tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111Thu, 17 May 2018 07:46:35 +0000climate policy paradigmArcticcommunicationstemperatureemergency actionclimate movement politicsemission reduction targetssea level risetipping pointscarbon budgetextreme weatherArctic sea-iceGillard government2 degree targetenvironments NGOsGreenlandcoalJames HansenLiberal policycarbon cycle feedbackscarbon tax and tradingdenialimpacts Australia4 degree impacts4 degreesHazelwoodpermafrostrenewable energy2 degree impactsVictoriaAntarcticaIPCCclimate sensitivityinternational negotiationspaleoclimatologyRudd government policyaerosolscampaigningrisk managementCPRSglobal warmingscientific reticencezero emissionsSouthern Cross Climate Coalitionfossil fuel subsidygaspost-carbon pathwayspublic opinionsafe climatewar economy3 degree impacts350Climate CommissionRoss Garnautclimate code redcopenhageneconomic modellingfiresocean acidificationACFChristine MilneGreensHimalayasMurdoch mediaadaptation mythcarbon capture and storagedoor-knockingfossil fuel industrygeoengineeringgreenhouse gas levelsmethaneoilpsychologyAmazonBill McKibbenGetUpHRLJet StreamKevin AndersonPine Island glacierSyriachinacollapseconflictcsgculture warcyclonesdangerous climate changeel ninoemissions budgetfaith organistaionsfirefood securityfrackingice-free earthliberalslimits to growthmotivational listeningnational securityplanning and adaptationstate of the climateunionsClimate Code RedThinking about climate change beyond politics and business as usualhttp://www.climatecodered.org/noreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)Blogger308125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-5119873742317528119Thu, 17 May 2018 07:26:00 +00002018-05-17T17:46:35.272+10:00Senate report recognises climate change as existential risk, but fails to draw the obvious conclusions<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-D2CeVTIifXw/WUkH-7DDwUI/AAAAAAAAB5A/wy2VA2QI6uU8oF3gELmTfzoVNFK_12pQACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/148cb0_ef4832a3fd3746539e0f971afbc38e53%257Emv2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-D2CeVTIifXw/WUkH-7DDwUI/AAAAAAAAB5A/wy2VA2QI6uU8oF3gELmTfzoVNFK_12pQACK4BGAYYCw/s320/148cb0_ef4832a3fd3746539e0f971afbc38e53%257Emv2.jpg" width="257" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley" target="_blank"><b>Download the Breakthrough report <br />on climate and security risks</b></a></td></tr></tbody></table>by <b>David Spratt</b><br /><br />Climate change is “a current and existential national security risk”, according to an Australian Senate <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/~/media/Committees/fadt_ctte/Nationalsecurity/report.pdf?la=en">report</a> released on Thursday 17 May. It says an existential risk is “one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development”. These are strong words.<br /><br />The report by the Senate’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee follows an Inquiry into the Implications of Climate Change for Australia’s National Security. Whilst many of the findings accord with the growing international recognition of climate change as a “threat multiplier” or an “accelerant to instability”, the inquiry’s recommendations lack a sense of urgency, especially since the “current existential risk” is being triggered today by the Australian Government’s insistence on &nbsp;expanding the use of fossil fuels.<br /><a name='more'></a><br /><br />On the positive side, the report:<br /><ul><li>Accepts the view of leading US expert, Sherri Goodman, whose visit to Australia in April 2017 was a catalyst for the inquiry, of retired defence chief Admiral Chris Barrie, and others, that climate change is “a threat multiplier... exacerbating existing threats to human security, including geopolitical, socio-economic, water, energy, food and health challenges that diminish resilience and increase the likelihood of conflict”. </li><li>Recognises that Australia and its neighbours are in the region most exposed to climate impacts, especially the Pacific Island countries and territories &nbsp;As a consequence, Australia has a growing responsibility for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. </li><li>Recognises that climate change is threatening the health of Australian, their communities, businesses and the economy; heightening the severity of natural hazards; increasinging the spread of infectious diseases; and creating growing water insecurity threats to agriculture. </li><li>Catalogues the challenges Australia’s defence forces will face, from rising sea levels to more hostile conditions for training and combat, and demands for more domestic as well as overseas emergency relief. </li><li>Notes the failure so far to adopt a fully-integrated, whole-of-government approach to climate-security risks. </li><li>Draws attention to the inadequacy of Australia’s emissions-reduction commitments, noting &nbsp;Ms Goodman’s evidence that: “Whilst the Paris climate accord’s goal are ‘keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels [and] to aim to limit the increase to 1.5°C’, the present commitment by governments will result in warming of 3°C or more. Such an outcome would have national security consequences so severe that some nations would cease to exist and the viability of many others would be severely challenged.” </li></ul>But there is a complete disconnect between the report’s findings and its recommendations. The main recommendations are procedural: the needs for a climate security white paper (which would at least keep the government’s eye on the subject); the development of a national climate, health and well-being plan; the release of Defence assessments of the climate risks to its facilities; the bureaucratic elevation of the issue by the creation of a dedicated climate security leadership position in the Home Affairs Portfolio and a dedicated senior leadership position in the Department of Defence.<br /><br />It also recommends that national security agencies increase their climate security knowledge and capability, an oblique recognition that these agencies are embarrassingly deficient in climate and security analytical capacity, in part due to their kowtowing to the government’s demotion of climate issues.<br /><br />There is a recommendation for additional money and foreign aid to “provide further funding for international climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction measures, in addition to the existing aid budget, to the extent that financial circumstances allow”. This stands in stark contrast to repeated cuts to Australia’s foreign aid, including in last week’s budget, and to the reduction in climate action overall.<br /><br />The inquiry is right to recognise climate change as an existential risk. In this sense, it is ahead of the large climate advocacy organisations, the national security agencies and the Australia academic community, who are laggards in articulating such risks. Indeed, it was Mark Crosweller, the Director General of Emergency Management Australia, Sherri Goodman the expert witness from the US, and the former senior Shell executive and emissions trading advisor to the Howard government, Ian Dunlop, who put the issue of existential climate security risks on the inquiry’s agenda.<br /><br />At present, the 2015 Paris Agreement commitments by various nations, if implemented, would result in planetary warming of more than 3°C by 2100, and when carbon-cycle feedbacks which are now becoming active are taken into account, the resultant warming is around 5°C of warming. Scientists say warming of 4°C or more could reduce the global human population by 80% or 90% and the World Bank reports “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible”.<br /><br />A 2007 study by two US national security think tanks, “The Age of Consequences” concluded that even 3°C of warming and a 0.5 metre sea-level rise would likely lead internationally and within nations to “outright chaos”, and “nuclear war is possible”, emphasising how “massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events”.<br /><br />The senate inquiry should have followed through on the consequences of such risks. Existential risks require a particular approach to risk management. They are not amenable to the reactive (learn from failure) approach of conventional risk management, and we cannot necessarily rely on the institutions, moral norms, or social attitudes developed from our experience with managing other sorts of risks. Because the consequences are so severe, even for an honest, truth-seeking, and well-intentioned investigator it is difficult to think and act rationally in regard to existential risks.<br /><br />The Senate inquiry has fallen victim to this problem, as has happened so often with Australian climate and energy policy. But time has now run out.<br /><br />Existential risk management requires brutally honest articulation of the risks, opportunities and the response time frame. At the moment we are knowingly locking in an existential disaster without being prepared to articulate that fact, which is a breach of the Senator’s fiduciary responsibility to the Australian community. &nbsp;At least this Senate inquiry report is significant for having broken the ice, but it should be so much more. <br /><br />http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/05/senate-report-recognises-climate-change.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-6966507617340977160Thu, 10 May 2018 01:46:00 +00002018-05-10T11:46:44.529+10:00What goes up must come down: It's time for a carbon drawdown budget<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gocNffZybes/WvOUzziAGJI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/nkbuNIFBPrwcaMf3W-gvlwJdho_su6oywCLcBGAs/s1600/Db18bK5VAAAks94.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="410" data-original-width="729" height="224" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gocNffZybes/WvOUzziAGJI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/nkbuNIFBPrwcaMf3W-gvlwJdho_su6oywCLcBGAs/s400/Db18bK5VAAAks94.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />&nbsp; by <b>David Spratt</b><br /><br />There is no carbon budget left for 1.5°C climate warming target, which means that to achieve this outcome every tonne of emissions must be matched by a tonne of drawdown of atmospheric carbon from now on. For that reason, carbon budgets and emissions target should be complemented by a <b>carbon drawdown budget </b>and target.<br /><br />That's the proposal made by Breakthrough, the Melbourne-based National Centre for Climate Restoration, to the Victorian climate change targets 2021-2030 expert panel, last week.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />In the submission, Breakthrough established that:<br /><ul><li>1.5°C of climate warming is not safe;</li><li>There is no carbon budget remaining for 1.5°C, so <i><b>“What goes up must come down”</b></i>;</li><li>“Overshoot” in emission reduction scenarios should be minimised in extent and duration to avoid tipping points that may be irreversible on human time-frames.</li></ul>Here's the story in more detail.<br /><br /><br /><b>1.&nbsp; 1.5°C of climate warming is not safe</b><br /><br />The Paris Agreement has a policy goal of 1.5–2°C, but even 1.5°C is far from safe and is not a satisfactory target:<br /><ul><li>In 2015, researchers looked at the damage to system elements — including water security, staple crops, land, coral reefs, vegetation and UNESCO World Heritage sites — as the temperature increases. They found all the damage from climate change to vulnerable categories like coral reefs, freshwater availability and plant life <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v9/n1/full/ngeo2607.html">could happen before 2°C warming is reached</a>, and much of it before 1.5°C warming.</li><li>&nbsp;In 2013, Australian scientists contributed to an important research paper which found that preserving more than 10% of coral reefs worldwide would <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n2/full/nclimate1674.html">require limiting warming to below 1.5°C</a>. Recent research found that the surge in ocean warming around the Great Barrier Reef in 2016-17, which led to the loss of half of the 2015 reef area, has <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3296">a 31% probability of occuring in any year</a> at just the current level of warming. In other words, severe bleaching and coral loss is likely on average every 3–4 years at the present level of warming (1–1.1°C), whereas corals take 10–15 years to recover from such events.</li><li>&nbsp;There is evidence that a 1.5ºC global rise in temperature is <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/340/6129/183">likely to cause widespread thawing of continuous permafrost</a> as far north as 60°N. At 1.5°C, the loss of permafrost area is <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3262">estimated to be four million square kilometres</a>.</li><li>At 1.5°C, it is very likely that conclusions first aired in 2014 –– that sections of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) have <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X14007961">already passed their tipping points for a multi-metre sea-level rise</a> –– will have been confirmed. Four years ago scientists found that "the retreat of ice in the Amundsen Sea sector of WAIS was unstoppable, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre worldwide… Its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea-level rise of between 3–5 metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.” </li><li>By 1.5°C, a sea-level rise of many metres, and perhaps tens of metres will have been locked into the system. In past climates, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels of around 400 parts per million (ppm) have been associated with sea levels around 25 metres above the present. Prof. Kenneth G. Miller notes that “the natural state of the Earth with present CO2 levels is one with <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120319134202.htm">sea levels about 20 meters higher than at present</a>”.&nbsp; The expected sea-level rise this century is generally in the range of one to two metres, but higher increases cannot be ruled out. The US military, for example, uses one- and two-metre sea-level-rise scenarios. The US NOAA&nbsp; provides <a href="https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/sw01000b.html">an “extreme” scenario of 2.5 metres sea level rise by 2100</a>.</li><li>On carbon cycle feedbacks, it is worth noting recent work which shows that some tropical forests — in the Congo, the Amazon, and in Southeast Asia — have already <a href="https://grist.org/article/the-last-ditch-effort-to-save-the-worlds-forests-from-climate-change/">shifted to a net carbon source</a>, and recent work on a soil carbon feedback in a 26-year soil-warming experiment in a mid-latitude hardwood forest, in which warming resulted in a complex pattern of <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6359/101">net carbon loss from the soil</a>, supporting projections of a long-term, positive carbon feedback from similar ecosystems as the world warms.</li></ul>At the current warming of just over 1°C compared to the late nineteenth century, Earth is now approximately 0.5°C warmer that the maximum of the Holocene (the period of relatively stable temperatures over the last nine thousands years and the period of human civilisation), and <a href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/8/577/2017/esd-8-577-2017.pdf">as warm as it was during the prior Eemian interglacial period</a>, when sea level reached 6-9 meters higher than today. It would be precautionary to establish a warming goal of less than 0.5°C, with the aim of cooling Earth back to this safe zone at the greatest possible speed. <br /><br /><br /><b>2.&nbsp; There is no carbon budget remaining for 1.5°C, so “What goes up must come down”</b><br /><br />There is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/dec/30/why-we-need-the-next-to-impossible-15c-temperature-target">no carbon budget for 1.5°C</a>, which means that to achieve this outcome, from now on every tonne of emissions must be matched by a tonne of drawdown of atmospheric carbon. <br /><br />The issues are canvassed at “<a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2016/09/unravelling-myth-of-carbon-budget-for.html">Unravelling the myth of a ‘carbon budget’ for 1.5°C.</a>” Rogelj et al. noted in 2017: “ If the 1.5°C limit should not be breached in any given year, the budget since 1870 is roughly halved and <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL075612/abstract"><b>already overspent today</b></a>” (emphasis added). <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QqPdWkzqomg/WvOVwZ-RmLI/AAAAAAAAAFY/KrnsYbz8TCsojQ-wlYv2AIHmWve2pauqACLcBGAs/s1600/fossil_fuel_chart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="719" data-original-width="720" height="319" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QqPdWkzqomg/WvOVwZ-RmLI/AAAAAAAAAFY/KrnsYbz8TCsojQ-wlYv2AIHmWve2pauqACLcBGAs/s320/fossil_fuel_chart.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>In fact, today’s CO2 level if maintained would produce a lot more warming that 1.5°C. In the early- to mid-Pliocene 3–4.5 millions year ago, CO2 levels were similar today at 365–415 ppm but&nbsp; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo724">temperatures were 3–4°C warmer than pre-industrial values and sea levels were 25 metres higher</a>.<br /><br />Warming is being masked by anthropogenic aerosol emissions, a good proportion of which are coming from fossil fuel extraction and use. This <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2017GL076079">temporary cooling is estimated at 0.7°C</a>, so global warming is likely to accelerate in the next few decades if the <a href="https://theconversation.com/masking-and-unmasking-of-global-warming-by-aerosols-19990">cooling influence of human-generated aerosols declines</a> as predicted. When this is taken into account, the implied warming for the current level of greenhouse gases <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.short">is more than 2°C</a>.<br /><br />Hence the Paris path of delayed emissions reductions, balanced by a probably unfeasible amount of drawdown in the second half of the century proposed by use of a technology that is unproven at scale&nbsp; — BECCS — is a dangerous path. There is growing alarm amongst scientists about the BECCS political fix, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2870;%20https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0055-2;%20https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14693062.2017.1413322">for example</a> Smith et al. 2016, van Vuuren et al. 2017 and Honegger &amp; Reiner 2017.&nbsp; It is worth noting the <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/policy-climate-advisers-must-maintain-integrity-1.17468">comments by Oliver Geden</a>, head of the EU Research Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Climate scientists and economists who counsel policy-makers are being pressured to extend their models and options for delivering mitigation later. This has introduced dubious concepts, such as repaying ‘carbon debt’ through ‘negative emissions’ to offset delayed mitigation — in theory… Climate researchers who advise policy-makers feel that they have two options: be pragmatic or be ignored… Many advisers are choosing pragmatism…&nbsp; Each year, mitigation scenarios that explore policy options for transforming the global economy are more optimistic — and less plausible (emphasis added).</blockquote>A more rapid rate of emission reduction than generally associated with the Paris path can reduce the reliance on drawdown, and especially BECCS.<br /><br />A paper just out, “<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0119-8">Alternative pathways to the 1.5°C target reduce the need for negative emission technologies</a>”, is worthy of a close look, and some of its propositions could be adopted by the Victorian Government.<br /><br />Since all emissions from now on must be matched by at least an equivalent amount of drawdown: <b>A Victorian carbon budget and emissions target should be complemented by a Victorian carbon drawdown budget and target.</b><br /><br />The adoption of a carbon drawdown budget would help to normalise as necessary what is still, too often, constructed as a distant and theoretical task.<br /><br />A recent paper by Kate Dooley at UniMelb, “Land-based negative emissions: risks for climate mitigation and impacts on sustainable development”, found <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10784-017-9382-9">the most cost-effective large-scale drawdown action is the restoration of carbon-dense and biologically rich natural forests</a>.&nbsp; There are also opportunities for increasing soil organic carbon (SOC), where more research work needs to be done, but one estimate from the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council is that increasing SOC could have<a href="http://www.academie-sciences.fr/en/Reseaux-internationaux-dacademies/negative-emission-technologies-what-role-in-meeting-paris-agreement-targets-report-by-the-easac.html"> the potential to absorb 2-3 GtC/year</a>.<br /><br /><br /><b>3. “Overshoot” in emission reduction scenarios should be minimised in extent and duration to avoid tipping points that may be irreversible on human time frames </b><br /><br />All 1.5°C scenarios involved “overshooting” the target before cooling back to 1.5°C by 2100. This overshoot should be minimised by adopting more stringent emission scenarios as the basis for policymaking.<br /><br />Global warming <a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/04/15c-of-warming-is-closer-than-we.html">will pass the 1.5°C threshold in about a decade from now</a>.<br /><br />All 1.5°C emission scenarios include a period of “overshoot” towards 2°C, before returning to the 1.5°C threshold by 2100.<br /><br /><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-58nGfEwWwLc/WvOV87MMy0I/AAAAAAAAAFc/sHQgKhiVZMYWcEBobsFAdDSDKk38VtMhgCLcBGAs/s1600/jz_climate_scenarios.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-58nGfEwWwLc/WvOV87MMy0I/AAAAAAAAAFc/sHQgKhiVZMYWcEBobsFAdDSDKk38VtMhgCLcBGAs/s320/jz_climate_scenarios.png" width="320" /></a>On the present high emissions path, warming will hit the 2°C by the mid-2040s, and large reductions in CO2 emissions will not by themselves significantly delay this timing, due to the <a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/02/quantifying-our-faustian-bargain-with.html">“Faustian bargain”</a> we have struck with our reliance on aerosols — a by-product of fossil fuel use — that by their significant but very short-term cooling impact are masking considerable warming. Going to zero emissions with CO2 at ~420 ppm would <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2017GL076079">result in a warming of around 2°C at equilibrium</a>, if the level of short-lived gases was constant.<br /><br />Thus the 1.5°C overshoot will last several decades and up to half a century in the Paris scheme of things.<br /><br />There are specific dangers in overshooting, which increase both with the duration and the magnitude of the overshoot.<br /><br />In a period of rapid warming, most major tipping points once crossed are irreversible in human time frames, principally due to the <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.short">longevity of atmospheric CO2</a>&nbsp; (a thousand years). At the COP23 in Bonn, Pam Pearson, Director of the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, <a href="ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7z61UZoppM&amp;feature=youtu.be">warned that the cryosphere is becoming “an irreversible driver of climate change”</a>. She said that most cryosphere thresholds are determined by peak temperature, and the length of time spent at that peak, warning that “later, decreasing temperatures after the peak are largely irrelevant, especially with higher temperatures and longer duration peaks”. She added: “What keeps cryosphere scientists up at night are irreversible thresholds, particularly West Antarctica and Greenland. The consensus figure for the irreversible melting of Greenland is at 1.6°C.”<br /><br />Thus “overshoot scenarios”, which are now becoming the norm in policy-making circles hold much greater risks. Specifically, overshoot to 2°C for up to half a century may trigger events and activate tipping points that cannot be reversed even with significant cooling.<br /><br />Hence a more rapid rate of emission reduction than generally associated with the Paris path can reduce in extent and duration the overshooting of the 1.5°C threshold. http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/05/what-goes-up-must-come-down-its-time.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-5141639335962484998Mon, 30 Apr 2018 02:59:00 +00002018-05-01T10:23:47.565+10:00The fiduciary responsibility of politicians and bureaucrats in the era of existential climate risks<b>by Ian Dunlop</b><br /><br />First published at <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/climate-change-fiduciary-responsibility-politicians-bureaucrats-59891/">Renew Economy</a>&nbsp; <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">“Fiduciary: a person to whom power is entrusted for the benefit of another”“Power is reposed in members of Parliament by the public for exercise in the interests of the public and not primarily for the interests of members or the parties to which they belong. The cry ‘whatever it takes’ is not consistent with the performance of fiduciary duty”<br />— Sir Gerard Brennan AC, KBE, QC </blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z0uFvDRmLeI/WuZzQMP-BwI/AAAAAAAAAE4/iZntYdt-I9QJuajQ_yBH5iadTXes9sqggCLcBGAs/s1600/148cb0_55f17004f21b4689bcfd7efcad23315a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="294" data-original-width="238" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z0uFvDRmLeI/WuZzQMP-BwI/AAAAAAAAAE4/iZntYdt-I9QJuajQ_yBH5iadTXes9sqggCLcBGAs/s1600/148cb0_55f17004f21b4689bcfd7efcad23315a.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ian Dunlop</td></tr></tbody></table>After three decades of global inaction, none more so than in Australia, human-induced climate change is now an existential risk to humanity. That is, a risk posing large negative consequences which will be irreversible, resulting inter alia in major reductions in global and national population, species extinction, disruption of economies and social chaos, unless carbon emissions are reduced on an emergency basis.<br /><br />The risk is immediate in that it is being locked in today by our insistence on expanding the use of fossil fuels when the carbon budget to stay below sensible temperature increase limits is already exhausted.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />As one of the countries most exposed to climate impact, and in the top half dozen carbon polluters worldwide when exports are included, as they must be, this should be of major concern to Australia.<br /><br />Instead, politicians and bureaucrats urge massive fossil fuel expansion to supply domestic and Asian markets, the latter justified on the grounds of poverty alleviation and the drug peddlers argument that: “if we don’t supply it, others will”. Blind to the fact that fossil fuels are now creating far more poverty than they are alleviating.<br /><br />In so doing Australia would be complicit in destroying the conditions which make human life possible.&nbsp; There is no greater crime against humanity.<br /><br />Regulators&nbsp;now recognise that climate risk far outweighs the financial risks which triggered the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and demand action. Company directors have a fiduciary responsibility to understand, assess and act upon climate risk.Overseas, directors are&nbsp; already facing legal action, and personal liability, for having refused to do so, or for misrepresenting that risk. Compensation is being sought from carbon polluters for damage incurred from climate impact.&nbsp; Similar action will be taken here.<br /><br />But what of our politicians and bureacrats and their contribution to this crime? The last few years have seen an unprecendented stream of lies and disinformation emanating from our official bodies around climate and energy policy, in blatant disregard of the facts, with seemingly no end to distortions designed to achieve short-term political advantage.<br /><br />What fiduciary responsibility do they have to the community they are supposed to serve?<br /><br />Ministers repeatedly remind us that the first responsibility of government is the security of the people.&nbsp; On any balanced assessment of the science and evidence, climate change is now the greatest threat to that security and to our future prosperity.<br /><br />Australia signed and ratified the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, presumably with the intent of meeting its objectives to limit global average temperature increase to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.50C”, and “to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible – in accordance with best available science”, recognising &nbsp;that “climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet”.<br /><br />The voluntary Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) made by Paris participants, if implemented, would not meet the objectives, leading to a global temperature increase in the 3-4 degrees Celsius (C) range, a world incompatible with an organised global community.<br /><br />The Australian commitment, of a 26-28% emission reduction by 2030 on 2005 levels, is derisory on any fair international comparison.<br /><br />Regional temperature variations would be far greater than these global averages, rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable even at 2C, beyond the capacity of human physiology to function effectively. This may well be the case across much of Australia.<br /><br />Since Paris, our Federal Government has ignored the Agreement, brushing off the increasingly urgent warnings of “the best available science” and ramping up fossil fuel expansion, whilst placing every possible obstacle in the way of low-carbon energy alternatives.<br /><br />The fact that many Ministers and parliamentarians are climate deniers for ideological or party political reasons, does not absolve them of the fiduciary responsibility to set aside their personal prejudices and to act in the public interest with integrity, fairness and accountability.<br /><br />This requires them to understand the latest climate science and to act accordingly.&nbsp; It is not acceptable for those in positions of public trust to dismiss these warnings in the cavalier manner which has typified the last few years, particularly when the risk is existential.<br /><br />The Prime Minister failed this test recently by implying the disastrous Tathra bushfires had nothing to do with climate change.&nbsp; Every extreme weather event today has some element of climate change involved; it is irresponsible to imply otherwise.<br /><br />Ministers justify their approach by misrepresenting international studies to support their fossil fuel expansion ambitions. Notably by citing the work of the International Energy Agency (IEA).<br /><br />The IEA sets out its perspective on the energy sector over the next 25 years in its annual <i>World Energy Outlook</i> (WEO), exploring the implications of alternative climate and energy scenarios.<br /><br />The key IEA scenarios are: current policies (CP) which assumes business-as-usual (4-5C temperature increase), new policies (NP) which extends CP with policy committed to but not yet implemented (3.5-4C temperature increase), and sustainable development (SDS) which is the pathway to meet various sustainable development goals.<br /><br />SDS claims to keep global average temperature increase below 2C, but only with a 50% chance of success by relying on massive investment in sequestration technologies which have yet to be invented.<br /><br />In reality, SDS would result in temperature increase substantially above 2C. There is no scenario which realistically achieves the Paris objectives.<br /><br />The IEA is no paragon of virtue regarding climate change.<br /><br />It downplays both climate impact, and the potential of alternative energy sources, as a result of strong pressure politically from its developed country membership, and from vested interests who make up its advisory bodies such as the IEA Energy Business Council and the Coal Industry Advisory Board.<br /><br />Consequently their scenarios are seized upon to justify further fossil fuel investment. &nbsp;For Australia, Asia Pacific coal demand is a key factor, this being our major export market.<br /><br />In the&nbsp;November 2017 <i>WEO</i>, under the NP assumptions annual coal demand increases by 12% or 480 million tonnes by 2040, but under SDS assumptions it declines by 47% or 1880 million tonnes.<br /><br />The IEA takes NP as their central scenario, as this is where we are headed if governments implement their current commitments.<br /><br />However, in the fine print the IEA make it clear that NP is not a sustainable future. In the 2017 <i>WEO,</i> Executive Director Fatih Birol says: “Decision-makers also need to know where they would like to get to — this is the point of the SDS scenario”, even though SDS does not meet the Paris objectives.<br /><br />Having ratified Paris, presumably this is at least where Australia wants to get to.&nbsp;Not so our Ministers.<br /><br />At his National Press Club address&nbsp;on 28 March 2018, Resource Minister Canavan insisted on using the IEA NP scenario of a 480 million tonnes annual demand increase by 2040 to justify expansion of our coal industry, ignoring the SDS 1880 million tonnes decline.<br /><br />The latter is the minimum transition to approach a sustainable future; many existing operations become stranded assets before the end of their working life, and certainly no new coal investment. Ministers Frydenberg and Ciobo similarly insist on using NP estimates and ignore the SDS.<br /><br />Minister Canavan then assured the Press Club that in the first 40 years of this century, the world will use more coal than in the entire previous history of the coal industry.<br /><br />The IEA repeatedly emphasise that their scenarios are not forecasts.&nbsp; They are designed to give decision-makers an understanding of the implications of their actions, and they only cover part of the story.<br /><br />If the NP pathway is followed, there will be no market for export coal as Asia Pacific economies will shrink rapidly under the weight of climate impact.&nbsp; If more coal is used by 2040 than in previous history, humanity will become extinct. These are consequences the IEA does not discuss.<br /><br />Such ministerial naivety is laughable, but it highlights a serious governance failure.&nbsp;As with company directors, it is incumbent upon ministers to understand these issues, in particular the risks to which the Australian community is exposed by their decisions.<br /><br />The only possible justification for Minister Canavan’s view is that he does not believe climate change is even a problem, let alone accept the need to rapidly reduce emissions. Further, he has no understanding of the implications of his proposed action.<br /><br />Whatever the Minister’s personal position, or the views of those who voted for him, given the overwhelming science and evidence confirming the urgency to address climate change, such ignorance is unacceptable and a fundamental breach of his fiduciary responsibility to the nation. <br /><br />At the National Press Club, Mi Canavan reacted angrily to a suggestion that the coal industry will phase out, objecting strongly to any thought of planning a transition.&nbsp; The mining industry will undoubtedly remain an essential part of the Australian economy, but markets for commodities come and go.<br /><br />Irrespective of political preferences, absent some unlikely technological breakthrough to sequester its emissions, coal will phase out, not instantaneously but relatively rapidly. Coal has been through many transitions in the past.<br /><br />The lesson from these disruptions is the need for thorough planning, retraining and support to avoid many people being badly hurt. Even more will be hurt, with massive climate impact, social and economic chaos, if the coal industry is expanded. It is irresponsible for the Minister to leave communities unprepared for these realities.<br /><br />Minister Canavan then turned on “well funded” environmental groups “abusing” our “robust environmental laws” to prevent or slow down major projects, such as the Adani coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.<br /><br />Australia’s environmental laws were developed when human impact on the environment was far less than &nbsp;today. As that impact has grown, far from being robust, these laws are no longer “fit for purpose”.<br /><br />In particular, being domestically focused, they do not take account of the greatest environmental risk of all, which is climate change.<br /><br />Under current UNFCCC rules, emissions from fossil fuel exports such as coal or gas are accounted for in the consuming country and are ignored by Australian courts and institutions in granting approvals for projects such as Adani.<br />However carbon emissions have global impact; coal exports from the Galilee Basin, would have major climate and environmental implications in Australia, as well as in consuming countries such as India. Our laws must be reframed accordingly if they are to be meaningful.<br /><br />As for “well funded”? Vested interests pour vastly more money into supporting fossil fuel expansion than has ever been available to environmental groups.<br /><br />Parliamentarians, particularly ministers seem to have lost sight of the fact that they have a fiduciary responsibility to the public, which imposes upon them a public duty and a public trust.<br /><br />Sir Gerard Brennan again: “all decisions and exercises of power should be taken in the interests of the public, and that duty cannot be subordinated to, or qualified by, the interests of the (parliamentarian/minister)”.<br /><br />It is entirely appropriate, when the legal system fails, for affected parties to take action to correct such failure, as with Adani, and with CSG projects in many parts of the country. In fact these are the only groups who are genuinely acting in the public interest.<br /><br />That the Federal government is now trying to muzzle them indirectly via the proposed Foreign Donations Bill is a further breach of its fiduciary responsibility.<br /><br />The public has the right to expect that Minister Canavan take an holistic view of the Adani project and the many other fossil fuel developments he is promoting, including an honest appraisal of their climate implications for the community.&nbsp;That is not happening.<br /><br />Similarily with Environment and Energy Minister Frydenberg, who should be proactive in changing environmental laws to include the climate impact of fossil fuel exports on Australia, rather than advocating that&nbsp; Adani proceed on the grounds it has met current inadequate environmental approvals.<br /><br />Minister Frydenberg, and the government generally, breach their fiduciary duty by promoting poor climate and energy policy as represented by the National Energy Guarantee, whatever that ultimately means.<br /><br />This lowest common denominator solution is only being considered because of the fiduciary irresponsibility of a minority group of right wing parliamentarians, inappropriately identified as the Monash Forum, who put their own self-serving ideological agenda ahead of the public interest.<br /><br />To claim, as the Minister did in his National Press Club speech&nbsp;on 11thApril 2018, that:<br /><br />“the future of energy policy must be determined by the proper consideration of the public’s best interest not ideologically-driven predisposition”<br /><br />just adds insult to injury given that the Coalition is, and has been for two decades, in total ideological denial on climate which largely explains our current policy shambles.<br /><br />The cost to Australia of this self-indulgence is enormous.<br /><br />The Minister also misrepresents IEA analysis of Australia’s energy policies.&nbsp; The IEA conducts a periodic review of individual member countries policies.<br /><br />The latest IEA Australian review in February 2018 was presented by Minister Frydenberg as “backing the government’s energy policies —&nbsp; commending Australia’s commitment to affordable, secure and clean energy”.<br /><br />The report itself did no such thing, being highly critical in many areas, including Australia’s continuing failure to comply with IEA membership oil stockholding obligations of 90 days net imports.<br /><br />We hold less than half that, thus rendering Australia incapable of contributing to IEA collective action in the event of an international oil crisis; a further major security threat to the Australia community which has not been addressed despite repeated representations over many years.<br /><br />In the light of these ingrained fiduciary failings, what of the bureaucracy, historically revered for providing “frank and fearless advice” to the political class?&nbsp; It seems that analogy no longer applies.&nbsp; In recent policy reviews, the refusal to accept and articulate the implications of climate change on Australia shines through.<br /><br />The December 2017 Review of Climate Change Policy&nbsp;was one of the most dishonest reports ever published by government in the climate arena.<br /><br />What purported to be a comprehensive review of the climate change challenge, and responses to it, is nothing more than a re-iteration of Australia’s wholly inadequate and inconsistent policies.<br /><br />No discussion of the latest climate science and its implications, no preparedness to face up to the real action required. In short little more than political whitewash for public consumption, pretending to do something whilst doing little.<br /><br />The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper acknowledged that climate change will be an important influence on international affairs, particularly in our region.<br /><br />It then anticipated: “buoyant demand for our exports of high-quality coal and LNG” based on the IEA NP scenario referred to above, around which policy is presumably centred, despite the fact that demand under this scenario would be decimated by climate impact.<br /><br />This should be unacceptable to DFAT as our lead Paris negotiator, as it is totally inconsistent with meeting Paris objectives.<br /><br />The 2016 Defence White Paper&nbsp;for the first time did mention climate change in passing in one of its six key strategic drivers of Australia’s security environment to 2035 and it is understood the Department of Defence have since extended their planning to prepare for its impacts as a “threat multiplier”.<br /><br />This is encouraging, but far behind action being taken by the military overseas.<br /><br />The overriding impression is that the Federal bureaucracy, with some notable exceptions, are not treating climate change with anywhere near the urgency it demands; whether because of political pressure to downplay the issue, or because of personal convictions, is not clear.&nbsp; Either way, fiduciary responsibility arises again.<br /><br />The Australian Public Service Impartiality Value&nbsp;requires advice given to government to be “apolitical, frank, honest, timely and based on the best available evidence”.<br /><br />Further, it must be “objective and non-partisan; relevant comprehensive and unaffected by fear of consquences, not withholding important facts or bad news; mindful of the context in which policy is to be implemented, the broader policy direction set by government and its implications for the longer term”.<br /><br />Henceforth, climate change will determine policy across the spectrum, encompassing national security, defence, energy, health, migration, water, agriculture, transport, urban design and much more.<br /><br />Given continued urgent warnings from scientists, including the government’s own experts, on the need for far more rapid action, the parlous state of our climate and energy debate and the shortcomings in policy formulation, the Federal bureaucracy is hardly meeting its own standards of fiduciary responsibility to the community.<br /><br />So what can be done?<br /><br />Many argue that current failures are the nature of politics and we should expect little else. But when the key issues are existential, that is to consign democracy to the dustbin of history and to accept increasing social chaos.<br /><br />In contrast to earlier eras, the concepts of fiduciary responsibility, public interest and public trust, are clearly not understood by the incumbency, from the Prime Minister down.&nbsp; This has to be corrected.<br /><br />A Federal Parliament with any degree of such responsibility, would recognise that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to Australia’s future prosperity, requiring emergency action.<br /><br />To those prepared to honour this obligation, there is ample information before parliament to warrant that conclusion. In the public interest, parliamentarians would set aside party political differences, adopting a bipartisan approach to structuring such action, with the bureaucracy in full support.<br /><br />That is highly unlikely, so there remains legal action. Around the world the seriousness of the climate threat, and the inaction of governments, is prompting communities to take this step, with increasing success. &nbsp;The same will happen in Australia, absent an outburst of commonsense within the political class.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Ian Dunlop was formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is a Member of the Club of Rome </blockquote><br /><br />http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/04/the-fiduciary-responsibility-of.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-2591520665608745257Wed, 04 Apr 2018 22:00:00 +00002018-04-16T09:14:35.282+10:00temperaturetipping points1.5°C of warming is closer than we imagine, just a decade away<b>by David Spratt, </b>first published at <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/climate-change-1-5c-closer-imagine-44124/"><i>Renew Economy</i></a><b></b><br /><b><br /></b>Also available in <b><a href="http://leclimatoblogue.blogspot.ca/2018/04/15-c-de-rechauffement-dans-seulement.html">French</a></b><br /><b><br /></b>Updated<b> 16 April 2018</b><br /><br />Global warming of 1.5°C is imminent, likely in just a decade from now. That’s the stunning conclusion to be drawn from a number of recent studies, surveyed below.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j2CxZ_zzpWQ/WsRd52dsYII/AAAAAAAAADA/OHmSaCZQ06YIzyF38Jvt2UzeWntShuDagCLcBGAs/s1600/Paris%2Bcommitments.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="531" data-original-width="244" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j2CxZ_zzpWQ/WsRd52dsYII/AAAAAAAAADA/OHmSaCZQ06YIzyF38Jvt2UzeWntShuDagCLcBGAs/s320/Paris%2Bcommitments.png" width="147" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paris Commitments now put the <br />world on a path of 3.4°C of <br />warming by 2100 <br />(Climate Action Tracker)</td></tr></tbody></table>So how does hitting warming of 1.5°C a decade from now square with the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”? In two words, it doesn’t. <br /><br />The Paris text was a political fix in which grand words masked inadequate deeds. The voluntary national emission reduction commitments since Paris now put the world on <a href="http://climateactiontracker.org/publications/briefing/288/Improvement-in-warming-outlook-as-India-and-China-move-ahead-but-Paris-Agreement-gap-still-looms-large.htm">a path of 3.4°C of warming by 2100</a> (as illustrated), and <a href="https://globalchange.mit.edu/publications/signature/2015-energy-and-climate-outlook">more than 5°C</a> if high-end risks including carbon-cycle feedbacks are taken into account.<br /><br />The Paris outcome is an emissions path continuing to rise for another fifteen years, even though it is clear that “if the 1.5°C limit should not be breached in any given year, the budget (is) <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL075612/abstract">already overspent today</a>”. Two years ago, Prof. Michael E. Mann <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/dec/30/why-we-need-the-next-to-impossible-15c-temperature-target">noted</a>: “And what about 1.5°C stabilisation? We’re already overdrawn.”<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>In fact, the emission scenarios associated with the Paris goal show that warming will <a href="https://globalchange.mit.edu/publications/signature/2015-energy-and-climate-outlook">“overshoot” the 1.5°C target</a> by up to half a degree, before cooling back to it by the end of this century. Those scenarios <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aab2ba/meta">rely unduly</a> on unproven Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) technology in the second half of the century, because the Paris Agreement does not encompass the steep emissions reductions that are required right now.<br /><br />Average global warming is now 1.1°C above the late nineteenth century, and the rate of warming <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2552">is likely to accelerate</a> due to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/03/21/bad-news-for-the-climate-coal-burning-and-carbon-%20emissions-are-on-the-rise-again">record levels of greenhouse gas emissions</a>, a <a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/01/new-study-on-climate-sensitivity-not.html">higher climate sensitivity</a> and because efforts to clean up some of the world’s dirtiest power plants is reducing the emission of <a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/02/quantifying-our-faustian-bargain-with.html">aerosols</a> (mainly sulphates) which have a very short-term cooling impact.<br /><br />So now, in 2018, the benchmark of 1.5°C of warming is just a decade away or even less, according to multiple lines of evidence from climate researchers:<br /><br /><b>HENLEY and KING:</b> In 2017, Melbourne researchers &nbsp;Ben Henley and Andrew King published <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL073480/full"><i>Trajectories toward the 1.5°C Paris target: Modulation by the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation</i></a> on the impact of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) on future warming. The IPO is characterized by sea surface temperature fluctuations and sea level pressure changes in the north and south Pacific Ocean that occur on a 15-30 year cycle. In the IPO’s positive phase, surface temperatures are warmer due to the transfer of ocean heat to the atmosphere. &nbsp;The IPO has been in a negative phase since 1999 but recent predictions suggest that it is now moving to a positive phase. The authors found that “in the absence of external cooling influences, such as volcanic eruptions, the midpoint of the spread of temperature projections exceeds the 1.5°C target before 2029, based on temperatures relative to 1850–1900”. In more detail,”a transition to the positive phase of the IPO would lead to a projected exceedance of the target centered <b>around 2026</b>”, and “if the Pacific Ocean remains in its negative decadal phase, the target will be reached around 5 years later, <b>in 2031</b>”.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Hokw3oMmJEo/WsReWzslJSI/AAAAAAAAADE/lsnhbrIjuDsJqnesCv_wQWP67PoRfikzQCLcBGAs/s1600/Henely%2Band%2BKing.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="434" data-original-width="731" height="236" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Hokw3oMmJEo/WsReWzslJSI/AAAAAAAAADE/lsnhbrIjuDsJqnesCv_wQWP67PoRfikzQCLcBGAs/s400/Henely%2Band%2BKing.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Projected temperature rises with IPO in positive mode (red) and negative mode (blue) &nbsp;&nbsp;(Henley and King, 2017)</td></tr></tbody></table>&nbsp;<b>JACOB et al: </b>A set &nbsp;of four future emission scenarios, known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) have been used since 2013 as a guide for climate research and modelling. The four pathways, known as RCPs 2.6, 4.5, 6 and 8.5, are based on the total energy imbalance in the energy system by 2100. RCP8.5 is the highest, and is the current emissions path. In <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017EF000710"><i>Climate Impacts in Europe Under +1.5°C Global Warming</i></a>, released this year, Daniela Jacob and her co-researchers found that the world is likely to pass the +1.5°C threshold <b>around 2026</b> for RCP8.5, and “for the intermediate RCP4.5 pathway the central estimates lie in the relatively narrow window <b>around 2030</b>. In all likelihood, this means that a +1.5°C world is imminent.”<br /><br /><b>KONG AND WANG:</b> In a study of projected permafrost change, <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927817300680"><i>Responses and changes in the permafrost and snow water equivalent in the Northern Hemisphere</i></a><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927817300680"><i> under a scenario of 1.5 °C warming</i></a>, researchers Ying Kong and Cheng-Hai Wang use a multi-model ensemble mean from 17 global climate models, with results showing that the threshold of 1.5°C warming will be reached<b> in 2027, 2026, and 2023</b> under RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP8.5, respectively. &nbsp;On the present, high-emissions RCP8.5 path, the estimated permafrost area will be reduced by 25.55% or 4.15 million square kilometres at 1.5°C of warming.<br /><br /><b>XU and RAMANTHAN: </b>&nbsp;A recent study by Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/39/1031"><i>Well below 2 °C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes</i></a>, looked at the high-end or “fat-tail” risks of climate change, in an analysis of the existential risks in a warming world. One of two baseline scenarios used, named Baseline-Fast, assumed an 80% reduction in fossil fuel energy intensity by 2100 compared to 2010 energy intensity. In this scenario, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide had reached 437 parts per million (ppm) by 2030 and the warming was 1.6°C, suggesting that the 1.5°C would be exceed <b>around 2028</b>. The study also found that under the Baseline-Fast scenario warming would reach 2.4°C by 2050. It is discussed in more detail <a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/01/what-we-learned-about-climate-system-in.html">here</a>.<br /><br /><b>ROGELJ et al:</b> In <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0091-3"><i>Scenarios towards limiting global mean temperature increase below 1.5</i><i>°C</i></a>, Joeri Rogelj and co-researchers plot future emissions and warming based on five distinct “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” (SSPs). These “present five possible future worlds that differ in their population, economic growth, energy demand, equality and other factors”, according to <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-scenarios-world-limit-warming-one-point-five-celsius-2100">CarbonBrief</a>. The fourth and fifth paths are the world we now live in: SSP4 is a world of “high inequality”, whilst SSP5 is a world of “rapid economic growth” and “energy intensive lifestyles”. &nbsp;If we look at these paths charted against projected temperatures, then SSP5 exceeds 1.5°C<b> in 2029 </b>and SSP4 <b>by 2031</b>.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fWgWw2aJio8/WsResORmCcI/AAAAAAAAADM/detDmmfaVb0lsL9wDoBGSIBT1WV27TJ6QCLcBGAs/s1600/SSP%2Bwarming.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="489" data-original-width="661" height="295" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fWgWw2aJio8/WsResORmCcI/AAAAAAAAADM/detDmmfaVb0lsL9wDoBGSIBT1WV27TJ6QCLcBGAs/s400/SSP%2Bwarming.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Projected global mean temperature for five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (CarbonBrief)</td></tr></tbody></table><b>SCHURER et al:</b> &nbsp;In <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0086-8"><i>Interpretations of the Paris climate target</i></a>, Andrew Schurer and colleagues demonstrate that the IPCC uses a definition of global mean surface temperature which underestimates the amount of warming over the pre-industrial level. The underestimation is around 0.3°C, and a higher figure includes the effect of calculating warming for total global coverage rather than for the coverage for which observations are available, and warming from a true pre-industrial, instead of a late-nineteenth century, baseline. If their finding were applied, warming would now be 1.3°C or more, and hitting the 1.5°C benchmark would be <b>just half a decade away</b>. <br /><br /><b>CONSEQUENCES:</b> In their 2017 <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/09/14/1618481114.short">paper on catastrophic climate risks</a>, Xu and Ramanathan defined 1.5°C as a benchmark for “dangerous” climate change, compared to the convention policy-making mark of 2°C. But even this lower mark may be too optimistic, given the impacts we have seen at both poles in the last decade. In any case, in contemplating the imminent reality of the 1.5°C benchmark, it is important to consider what is at stake:<br /><ul><li>In another decade and by 1.5°C, we may well have witnessed an <b>Arctic free of summer sea ice</b>, a circumstance that just two decades ago was not expected to occur for another hundred years. &nbsp;The consequences would be devastating. </li><li>In 2012, then NASA climate science chief <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-17/arctic-sea-ice-heads-for-record-low-as-melt-exceeds-forecasts.html">James Hansen told Bloomberg</a> that: “Our greatest concern is that loss of Arctic sea ice creates a grave threat of passing two other tipping points – the potential <b>instability of the Greenland ice sheet</b> and methane hydrates… These latter two tipping points would have consequences that are practically irreversible on time scales of relevance to humanity.” One <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1449">highly-regarded research paper</a> in 2012 estimated that “the warming threshold leading to a monostable, essentially ice-free state is in the range of 0.8–3.2°C, with a best estimate of 1.6°C” for the Greenland ice sheet. </li><li>In 2015, researchers <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v9/n1/full/ngeo2607.html">looked at the <b>damage to system elements</b></a> — including water security, staple crops land, coral reefs, vegetation and UNESCO World Heritage sites — as the temperature increases. They found all the damage from climate change to vulnerable categories like coral reefs, freshwater availability and plant life could happen before 2°C warming is reached, and much of it before 1.5°C warming. </li><li>In 2009, Australian scientists contributed to <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n2/full/nclimate1674.html">an important research paper</a> which found that preserving more than 10% of <b>coral reefs</b> worldwide would require limiting warming to below 1.5°C. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3296">Recent research</a> found that the surge in ocean warming around the Great Barrier Reef in 2016, which led to the loss of half the reef, has a 31% probability of occuring in any year at just the current level of warming. In other words, severe bleaching and coral loss is likely on average every 3–4 years, whereas corals take 10–15 years to recover from such events. </li><li> There is evidence that a 1.5ºC global rise in temperature is likely to cause <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/340/6129/183">widespread thawing of continuous <b>permafrost</b></a> as far north as 60°N. At 1.5°C, the loss of permafrost area <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3262">is estimated</a> to be four million square kilometres. </li><li>At 1.5°C, it is very likely that conclusions first aired in 2014 –– that sections of the <b>West Antarctic Ice Sheet</b> have already passed their tipping points for a multi-metre sea-level rise –– will have been confirmed. Four years ago <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X14007961">scientists found</a> that "the retreat of ice in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise 1 metre worldwide… Its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea-level rise of between 3–5 metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.” Leading cryosphere researcher Eric Rignot <a href="https://e360.yale.edu/features/abrupt_sea_level_rise_realistic_greenland_antarctica">muses</a>: “You look at West Antarctica and you think: How come it’s still there?” </li><li>By 1.5°C, a <b>sea-level rise</b> of many metres, and perhaps tens of metres will have been locked into the system in the longer term. In past climates, carbon dioxide levels of around 400 ppm (which we exceeded three years ago) have been associated with <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-01/nocs-nsd010213.php">sea levels around 25 metres above the present</a>. And six years ago, Prof. Kenneth G. Miller <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120319134202.htm">noted</a> that “the natural state of the Earth with present carbon dioxide levels is one with sea levels about 20 meters higher than at present”. The expected sea-level rise this century is generally in the range of one to two metres, but higher increases cannot be ruled out. The US military, for example,&nbsp; use one- and two-metre sea-level-rise scenarios in their planning.</li></ul>Clearly, as Former NASA climate chief James Hansen and co-authors <a href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/8/577/2017/esd-8-577-2017.pdf">wrote last year</a>, “the world has overshot the appropriate target for global temperature”. They noted a danger of 1.5°C and 2°C targets is that they are far above the Holocene (human civilisation) temperature range, and if such temperature levels are allowed to long exist they will spur “slow” amplifying feedbacks which have potential to run out of humanity’s control. Hence “limiting the period and magnitude of temperature excursion above the Holocene range is crucial to avoid strong stimulation of slow feedbacks”. <br /><br />And in all this evidence, what worries me most? &nbsp;It is my experience that with few exceptions neither climate policy-makers nor climate action advocates have a reasonable understanding of the imminence of 1.5°C and its consequences.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: x-small;">RELATED STORIES</span><br /><ul><li><a href="http://reneweconomy.com.au/warming-past-1-5c-quantifying-our-faustian-bargain-with-fossil-fuels-24784/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Warming past 1.5°C: Quantifying our Faustian bargain with fossil fuels">Warming past 1.5°C: Quantifying our Faustian bargain with fossil fuels</a></li><li><a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/01/what-we-learned-about-climate-system-in.html">What we learned about the climate system in 2017 that should send shivers down the spines of policy makers</a></li><li><a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/07/paris-15-2c-target-far-from-safe-say.html">Paris 1.5-2°C target far from safe, say world-leading scientists</a></li></ul></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: x-small;">David Spratt is Research Director for Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration</span></blockquote>http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/04/15c-of-warming-is-closer-than-we.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-538965081864752434Sun, 25 Feb 2018 09:32:00 +00002018-02-26T10:13:45.156+11:00ArcticGreenlandWhat is happening in the Arctic is now beyond words, so here are the picturesIn the depths of the northern winter, and with 24-hour darkness at the North Pole, an extraordinary climate warming event is happening. And for many scientists it is now beyond words. So here from Zack Labe (<a href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe">@ZLabe</a>) are some images which tell the story of the recording-smashing warming and sea-ice melting occurring right now high in the Arctic.<br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Sea ice extent in the Bering Sea (Arctic) continues its decline. "Warm" and strong southerly winds have contributed to this anomalous retreat of ice into the Bering Strait. 2018 is the clear outlier in the satellite era (each thin line = 1979-2017, <a href="https://twitter.com/NSIDC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NSIDC</a> data) <a href="https://t.co/kzEV6yEFmp">pic.twitter.com/kzEV6yEFmp</a></div>— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) <a href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/967538448327352321?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 24, 2018</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><a name='more'></a><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">The extreme event continues to unfold in the high <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Arctic?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Arctic</a> today in response to a surge of moisture and "warmth" <br /><br />2018 is well exceeding previous years (thin lines) for the month of February. 2018 is the red line. Average temperature is in white (<a href="https://t.co/kO5ufUWrKq">https://t.co/kO5ufUWrKq</a>) <a href="https://t.co/cLeMxSxvWo">pic.twitter.com/cLeMxSxvWo</a></div>— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) <a href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/967838618252320768?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 25, 2018</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">There is open water north of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Greenland?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Greenland</a> where the thickest sea ice of the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Arctic?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Arctic</a> used to be. It is not refreezing quickly because air temperatures are above zero confirmed by <a href="https://twitter.com/dmidk?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@dmidk</a>'s weather station <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/KapMorrisJesup?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#KapMorrisJesup</a>. Wacky weather continues with scary strength and persistence. <a href="https://t.co/YMnvCD8XvL">pic.twitter.com/YMnvCD8XvL</a></div>— Lars Kaleschke (@seaice_de) <a href="https://twitter.com/seaice_de/status/967679640402874369?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 25, 2018</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">February? This is crazy. Retreat of sea ice in the Bering Sea continues - well below the previous record low in the satellite era. <a href="https://t.co/9UoqZvaFr2">pic.twitter.com/9UoqZvaFr2</a></div>— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) <a href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/966343051210735616?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 21, 2018</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Check out this massive hurricane-force low pressure (944 hPa) southeast of Greenland today...<br /><br />[<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MODIS?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MODIS</a> Terra, 250 m from <a href="https://twitter.com/NASAEarthData?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NASAEarthData</a> at <a href="https://t.co/tdqa1WdqWs">https://t.co/tdqa1WdqWs</a>] <a href="https://t.co/IyekQdkmB7">pic.twitter.com/IyekQdkmB7</a></div>— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) <a href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/967145033970298880?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 23, 2018</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Cape Morris Jesup (<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Greenland?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Greenland</a>'s northernmost observation station) is now reporting temperatures well above freezing today... +6.1°C at the latest observation! Crazy! <br /><br />Station is provided by <a href="https://twitter.com/dmidk?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@dmidk</a> at <a href="https://t.co/kedfPPAg9q">https://t.co/kedfPPAg9q</a>. <a href="https://t.co/wEcs4B61mo">pic.twitter.com/wEcs4B61mo</a></div>— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) <a href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/967498889854050304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 24, 2018</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">The most intense surge of moisture/warmth (relative to average) for this event will be pushing over the North Pole tomorrow. Temperatures projected near 0°C. Meanwhile, brutal cold remains over Europe. <br /><br />Graphics available from <a href="https://t.co/PsOBvTVbA2">https://t.co/PsOBvTVbA2</a> <a href="https://t.co/LK6rvpaow6">pic.twitter.com/LK6rvpaow6</a></div>— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) <a href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/967591344402124802?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 25, 2018</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">A look at the loss of thicker (usually older) <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Arctic?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Arctic</a> sea ice in Octobers from 1979-2016 (PIOMAS, ice &lt; 1.5 meters masked black) <a href="https://t.co/BtHCwVUdKk">pic.twitter.com/BtHCwVUdKk</a></div>— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) <a href="https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/798240539409690625?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2016</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/02/what-is-happening-in-arctic-is-now.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-8505641829699921783Sun, 11 Feb 2018 22:13:00 +00002018-02-12T09:13:32.032+11:00carbon capture and storageemergency actionrisk managementDo we have the capability to reverse global warming within a meaningful timeframe?"Do we have the capability to reverse global warming within a meaningful timeframe?" was the topic for discussion at the Sustainable Living Festival's <a href="http://slf.org.au/event/great-debate/">Great Debate</a> on 9 February 2018. The contributions to the discussion by <b>David Spratt</b> and <b>Ian Dunlop</b> are reproduced here. Ian and David are also the authors of the recent reports <i><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath">What Lies Beneath: the scientific understatement of climate risks</a></i> and <i><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_8c0b021047fe406dbfa2851ea131a146.pdf">Disaster Alley: Climate change, conflict and risk</a>.</i><br /><br /><b>DAVID SPRATT</b><br /><br /><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bd40Gw5k5Y4/WoC4kRzLnUI/AAAAAAAAACQ/hQ-nQ2wZMmIAdqrQMiJP7iYfTiOs15zigCLcBGAs/s1600/davidsprat23-588x331.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="331" data-original-width="293" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bd40Gw5k5Y4/WoC4kRzLnUI/AAAAAAAAACQ/hQ-nQ2wZMmIAdqrQMiJP7iYfTiOs15zigCLcBGAs/s200/davidsprat23-588x331.jpg" width="175" /></a>The present 1°C of climate warming is already dangerous because critical tippings points have already been crossed. In 2014 glaciologist Eric Rignot said ice retreat in parts of West Antarctica was already “unstoppable”, with the “likely collapse of the rest of the ice sheet, and a 3-5 metre sea level rise”. That is, unstoppable unless temperatures decline below 1°C to the 1970s level.<br />In Paris in 2015, the rhetoric was of 1.5°C and 2°C, even as the voluntary, unenforceable agreements put warming on a path to 3°C, and perhaps 4°C.<br /><br />But 1.5°C is far from safe. A safe climate would be well less than the current warming, unless you think it is OK to destroy the Arctic ecosystem, tip West West Antarctic glaciers into a self-accelerating melt, and lose the world’s coral reefs, just for starters.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />Our dilemma is that burning fossil fuels also release a lot of nitrate and sulphate aerosols —&nbsp; the starters for acid rain — which have a very short-term cooling effect, keeping the planet two-thirds of&nbsp; a degree cooler than it would otherwise be.<br /><br />This is our deal with the devil, our “Faustian bargain”: the absolutely essential moves to eliminate fossil fuel emissions fast will also cut the cooling aerosol impact, and the resultant extra warming will push the planet up to very dangerous conditions, though not as hot as if we keep on a high-emissions path.<br /><br />Even going to zero emissions fast still means we fly past 1.5°C of warming, and get close to 2°C. Prof. Michael Mann explains: “We’ve already expended the vast majority of the budget for remaining under 2°C. And what about 1.5°C stabilization? We’re already overdrawn.”<br /><br />Carbon drawdown as large as feasible is absolutely necessary, but until you hit zero emissions, it acts to slow the rate of future warming, not to cool the planet.&nbsp; Carbon drawdown cannot be completed fast enough to prevent or reverse the significant tipping points currently crossed and others that are close at hand.<br /><br />Carbon drawdown of around 200 billion tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide would reduce warming by ~0.1°C. At present estimated costs, that’s $10-15 trillion per tenth of a degree of cooling. The most cost-effective large scale drawdown action is the restoration of carbon-dense and biologically rich natural forests.<br /><br />We can reduce the warming impacts of the short-lived gases impacts, of which methane is the largest component. Half the methane emissions are from human actions:&nbsp; fossil fuels, livestock, and landfills/waste.&nbsp; But it is expected non-anthropogenic methane emissions from wetlands and the Arctic will increase, and there is evidence that tropical forest carbon stores and now turning into carbon sources.<br /><br />Thus, without solar radiation management — replacing anthropogenic aerosols from fossil fuel use with anthropogenic aerosols distributed by planes — it will be difficult to avoid hitting 2°C no matter what emissions path we take, and impossible not to overshoot 1.5°C significantly.<br /><br />We are now in the land of least worse choices.<br /><br />Some will say solar radiation management or geoengineering cannot be used. Some will throw up their hands and say that that human species deserves to lay down in the bed it has made for itself: in other words, if we get wiped out, we deserved it. The problem is that those who made the bed are largely not those who will wipe out first.<br /><br />Given the carbon dioxide in the air now and the heat in the oceans, it is not scientifically possible to to “save the reef”, if the possibility of using solar radiation management is excluded.<br /><br />Solar radiation management only makes sense with very rapid actions towards zero emissions plus drawdown; and there is a demonstrable, clear, net environmental benefit from it.&nbsp; Much work is needed to see if that is the case, and it should only used if that is so. But we need to be honest about what will be lost and what tipping points will be crossed if it is not considered.<br /><br />We know human society is capable of amazing acts, whether it is building the pyramids, wiping out diseases, or facing down big natural emergencies.<br /><br />We can win on climate if we can transcend the international policy-making paradigm, that nothing should be done to disrupt neo-liberalism. But large scale disruption is now inevitable, one way or the other.<br /><br />We need an ethos of common purpose, of fair sharing of the burden, and shared sacrifice.<br /><br />This is an emergency, whole-of-society, response.<br /><br />In Ireland, a Climate Emergency Measures Bill, which has already passed the first stage reading will be debated this month seeks, to ban any new explorations for oil, coal, and gas on Irish territory. It’s something that we need here, too, just for starters.<br /><br />People are ready for this. Recent polling shows that <br /><ul><li>75% of Australians consider climate change a “global catastrophic risk”. </li><li>And 81% supported strong action even if it requires making considerable changes that impact on our current living standards.&nbsp;</li><li>Another survey in the US, UK, Canada and Australia found that 54% rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50% or greater, and a quarter rated the risk of humans being wiped out at 50/50 or greater. </li></ul>So it’s not that people don’t get it, emotionally and existentially. They do.<br /><br />What is missing is brave leadership which is prepared to say that winning slowly is now the same as losing.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><b>IAN DUNLOP</b></span><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BU4e_Cko9t4/WoC5Ls3Kr0I/AAAAAAAAACY/guMioxGM4WU2vKgcJhQJ5AGw3FZi9ncxQCLcBGAs/s1600/iandunlop234.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="289" data-original-width="295" height="195" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BU4e_Cko9t4/WoC5Ls3Kr0I/AAAAAAAAACY/guMioxGM4WU2vKgcJhQJ5AGw3FZi9ncxQCLcBGAs/s200/iandunlop234.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>In my view, the short answer to the question is no, unless we find the means to fundamentally reframe our approach to addressing global warming – and rapidly.<br /><br />David Spratt has set out some of the latest science and the realities we now face.&nbsp; I would like to comment briefly on the risk implications of that science, an aspect rarely discussed in Australia, or globally for that matter, and certainly not discussed honestly.&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />Given our refusal to seriously address the challenge to date, global warming is now about the management of&nbsp; existential risk, a risk which is beyond the experience of communities, governments, corporations, investors, financial markets and regulators.&nbsp; It is an unprecedented danger to the survival of humanity, barely mentioned, let alone accepted in our national discourse. It is a risk posing permanent large negative consequences to humanity which can never be undone; one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.&nbsp; <br /><br />Overwhelming expert opinion considers that the world is now exposed to this risk unless global carbon emissions are reduced far more rapidly than is contemplated under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the objective of which is to hold global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C”.&nbsp; Our current global emission trajectory would lead to a temperature increase in the 4-5°C range, a world which would be “incompatible with an organised global community”, with global population dropping from seven billion to below one billion as the impact of climate extremes takes effect.<br /><br />Even the 3°C outcome which would eventuate if current voluntary Paris commitments were implemented, would result in outright social chaos in many parts of the world. And yet our political, bureaucratic and corporate leaders, by and large, continue to deny even the existence of a climate change problem.&nbsp; <br /><br />To have any realistic chance of staying below the upper Paris objective of 2°C – which itself now represents extremely dangerous warming – we have no global carbon budget left today. That means we should shut down all fossil fuel operations tomorrow. Of course that will not happen, but it only underlines the risks we run by continuing to push carbon emissions into the atmosphere.&nbsp; <br /><br />Ostensibly, Australia is committed to the Paris Agreement.&nbsp; Reality is different. We have the Deputy Prime Minister only this week urging the opening up not just of the Adani mega-coal mine, but of a whole new coal province in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.&nbsp; Then there is the current inquiry in the Northern Territory which sees only “a medium (climate) risk of low consequence” in establishing a massive new shale gas fracking industry.&nbsp; In addition, major coal and coal seam gas expansion is proposed in NSW. All are in total contradiction of the Paris Agreement.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />This is extremely irresponsible given that our region is where the most severe impacts of climate change are already being felt. Northern Australia is particularly vulnerable to these risks, but leaders seem impervious to the danger posed to community well-being, provided they can notch up a few more jobs to shore up their short-term re-election prospects.<br /><br />By committing to these developments, we would be locking-in potentially catastrophic, irreversible, outcomes. In effect Australia has one foot lightly on the global warming brake whilst the other foot is hard on the accelerator. <br /><br />All to often we are told that Australia is such a small part of the global emission picture (domestic emissions about 1.3%), that anything we do is meaningless in attempting to solve the global challenge.&nbsp; Thus we can continue to expand our high-carbon economy with impunity.&nbsp; Such arguments completely ignore the massive carbon emissions we export with our fossil fuels sold overseas which, under UNFCCC formulae, are accounted for in the consuming country.&nbsp; If they are included, as they should be given the critical stage climate change has now reached, Australia is in the top half dozen carbon emitters world wide (around 5%). Our denialist policies act as a major accelerant of climate impact worldwide, in turn shooting ourselves in the foot with increased damage to the Australian economy and society.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />So what has to change? To avoid this catastrophic future, man-made greenhouse gas emissions have to be reduced, and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere drawn down on an emergency basis – far faster than currently contemplated.&nbsp; Emissions must be cut faster than the current market economic system can achieve under its short-term profitability imperative.&nbsp; <br /><br />Likewise, the official UNFCCC process will not achieve reductions in time to avoid serious, potentially irreversible, damage.&nbsp; While the UN approach should not be abandoned, given that a global forum for discussion is essential and few others are available, it must be supplemented by other mechanisms.<br /><br />There is no silver bullet solution, but much silver buckshot, as Paul Hawken is demonstrating with his excellent Drawdown project.&nbsp; We must make a rapid transition from a fossil fuel dependent economy to a low-carbon electrified economy based on solar, wind, hydro and biomass, with a strong focus on using less – that is, greater energy efficiency and conservation.&nbsp; No further fossil fuel development and no subsidies!&nbsp; This transition at a global level would eliminate two-thirds of currently projected human greenhouse gas emissions.&nbsp; If accompanied by changes in agricultural practices, land management and clearing – saving water and fertilizer and increasing soil carbon sequestration – the increase in the average global temperature could be brought back to below 1.5°C by the end of the century (excluding any unexpected impact of tipping points).&nbsp; <br /><br />So how do we achieve it? In Australia, the starting point must be an honest discussion with the Australian community on the real challenge we face.&nbsp; I know this is not a popular view.&nbsp; Supposedly little can be achieved using what some would term “scare tactics” – I prefer to call it “speaking the truth”. We have never had that conversation here, preferring instead to focus on inadequate “brightsiding” solutions.&nbsp;<br /><br />Unless the real challenge is understood, the solutions will never be implemented in the time required. Unfortunately our reluctance to do this has allowed the Establishment over the last two decades to erect multiple barriers to progress, amply demonstrated in the appalling Review of Climate Change Policy last December, along with the mirage of the National Energy Guarantee. <br /><br />With few exceptions, the level of understanding on the real implications of the climate science and risk among top level politicians, whether left or right, government decision-makers, bureaucrats, corporate and finance leaders is abysmal. Regulators on the other hand are becoming increasingly concerned about climate risks, albeit their initiatives still tend to focus on reactive and incremental change. NGOs, with a few exceptions, have preferred&nbsp; to avoid serious discussion on the climate reality and the need for an emergency response. Similarly, many scientists have been reluctant to speak openly due to political constraints, although that is now changing as the risks escalate. <br /><br />The net result is that the seriousness of the climate challenge is rarely discussed honestly and the public is largely ignorant of the escalating risks. But unless we have that conversation, constructively, community support for the massive changes, and opportunities, that lie ahead will continue to elude us, and the barriers to change will only get larger, given the Establishment’s dominant denialist mindset. <br /><br />Effective climate emergency action requires the cooperation of many organizations and millions of people across Australia. The solutions are available, as I have said.&nbsp; However to implement them at the speed and to the extent we need requires a critical mass of our community to convince, or force, the Establishment to abandon its rabid defence of the status quo, crossing the threshold to wholeheartedly take up the opportunities the transition to the low-carbon world presents.&nbsp; That is already happening to some extent as competitive alternatives to fossil fuels penetrate the Australian market, but it has to be greatly accelerated. <br /><br />But it is not just a question of technology.&nbsp; Global warming is highlighting the fact that the world is now hitting the real resource limits of the Earth System which have long been anticipated. Accordingly we have to rethink the entire social and economic systems under which we live. In the immortal words of Kenneth Boulding:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">“Anyone who considers economic growth can continue indefinitely in a finite system is either a madman or an economist”</blockquote>But that is a longer story.<br /><br />http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/02/do-we-have-capability-to-reverse-global.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-7079356379332212257Wed, 31 Jan 2018 22:32:00 +00002018-02-01T09:32:35.378+11:002 degree targetaerosolsemergency actionQuantifying our Faustian bargain with fossil fuels<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_33BZhsighw/WnGA7Fn-YKI/AAAAAAAAAB8/rV3fpxMqDmsWjc0hX1PXg7e654QVXF7jACLcBGAs/s1600/4243970-3x2-940x627.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="578" data-original-width="573" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_33BZhsighw/WnGA7Fn-YKI/AAAAAAAAAB8/rV3fpxMqDmsWjc0hX1PXg7e654QVXF7jACLcBGAs/s320/4243970-3x2-940x627.jpg" width="316" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our Faustian bargain: the byproduct of burning dirty <br />fossil fuels are short-lived atmospheric aerosols <br />which provide temporary cooling </td></tr></tbody></table>by <b>David Spratt</b><br /><br />The climate system will heat well past 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) and perhaps up to 2°C without any further fossil fuel emissions. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from new research which should also help demystify the rhetoric from the 2015 Paris climate talks of keeping warming to below 1.5°C .<br /><br />It’s not that 1.5°C isn’t dangerous: in fact, at just 1–1.1°C of warming to date, climate change is already dangerous. A safe climate would be well below the present level of warming, unless you think it is OK to <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.5445">destroy the Arctic ecosystem</a>, <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_0592372f2605428a9692ded05af64e61.pdf">tip West West Antarctic glaciers into a self-accelerating melt</a>, and <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n2/full/nclimate1674.html">lose the world’s coral reefs</a>, just for starters.<br /><br />The new research quantifies the effect of losing the very temporary planetary cooling provided by atmospheric aerosols.<br /><a name='more'></a>Aerosols (including black-carbon soot, organic carbon, sulphates and nitrates and dust) are very short-lived particles in the atmosphere that have a cooling impact that lasts around a week. Most of these aerosols are anthropogenic, that is produced by human activity, and most of the anthropogenic aerosols are a byproduct of the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Perhaps best known are the polluting sulphates and nitrates from coal-fired power stations, that combine with water molecules in the atmosphere to produce what is popularly known as “acid rain”.<br /><br />The problem is our “Faustian bargain”: these aerosols are keeping the planet cooler than it would otherwise be, but are coming from burning fossil fuels that pour carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, heating the planet for centuries to come. The absolutely essential moves to eliminate fossil fuel emissions will also cut the cooling aerosol impact; the net effect will push the planet towards very dangerous warming conditions.<br /><br />The big question is how much would that warming be?<br /><br />A number of scientists have estimated the figure at around 0.5°C. Writing in the Huffington Post in late 2015, Prof. Michael E Mann <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-e-mann/how-close-are-we-to-dangerous-planetary-warming_b_8841534.html">noted</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">While greenhouse warming would abate, the cessation of coal burning… would mean a disappearance of the reflective sulphate pollutants (aerosols) produced from the dirty burning of coal. These pollutants have a regional cooling effect that has offset a substantial fraction of greenhouse warming, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. That cooling would soon disappear, adding about 0.5°C to the net warming… So evidently, we don’t have one-third of our total carbon budget left to expend, as implied by the IPCC analysis. We’ve already expended the vast majority of the budget for remaining under 2°C. And what about 1.5°C stabilization? We’re already <i>overdrawn</i>.</blockquote>Now, new research published last week, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL076079/full">“Climate Impacts From a Removal of Anthropogenic Aerosol Emissions”</a>, has looked at the aerosols issue in more detail in. The work uses the latest generation of climate models, in which the aerosol-cloud interaction is more sophisticated, and also examines each aerosol component discreetly, rather than lumping them together as some simpler climate models do. &nbsp;One limitation is that this research utilises four climate models, whereas &nbsp;big inter-comparison projects are based on around 30, so more work needs to be done on these results.<br /><br />Bjørn Samset of the University of Oslo and his colleagues used four climate models, which cover a range of climate sensitivities, to see what would happen to the global average temperature if the short-lived greenhouse gases (methane, nitrous oxide etc) were kept at their current level, but CO2 emissions ceased once they have reached a level of 420 parts per million (ppm). (This is 15 ppm above the current level of 405 ppm, or just another five years of emissions at the current rate.)<br /><br />The result was average warming of 1.35°C over the four models, above a late 19th century baseline. (It has been <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632717/">demonstrated</a> that global average temperatures increase while CO2 is increasing, and then remain approximately constant until the end of the millennium despite zero further emissions.)<br /><br />They then asked what would happen if all anthropogenic aerosols emissions were to cease. The answer was that “removing aerosols induces a global mean surface heating of 0.5–1.1°C”, with a multi-model mean of 0.7°C. Samset says the vast majority of this net temperature change would be due to sulphate emissions from fossil fuel sources. This is because, in general terms, the other two forms of anthropogenic aerosols — black carbon and organic carbon, which have major contributions from biofuel and other biomass burning — cancel each other out, at roughly 0.1°C each, one cooling and one warming.<br /><br />In other words, going to zero emissions with CO2 at ~420ppm would result in a warming of around 2°C at equilibrium, if the level of short-lived gases was constant. Not going to zero emissions would be worse in the short term: other recent work <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/39/10315.full">shows</a> warming would be 2.2-2.4°C by 2050 if we continue on the current high-emissions path. &nbsp;And it would be disastrously worse not to go to zero emission very fast, due to the longer-term impacts: continuing on the current high-emissions trajectory would bring warming of 4.1–5°C by 2100.<br /><br />A new <a href="https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/long-range/decadal-fc">UK Met Office forecast</a> released yesterday on climate conditions for 2018-2022 say that "over the whole five-year period… global average temperature is expected to be between 1.10°C and 1.40°C relative to pre-industrial conditions", which would likely be warmer than the record-breaking El Nino year in 2016 of 1.14°C. And the Met says there is a 10% chance one of those years will bust through 1.5°C. <br /><br />So whereas the Paris agreement delays strong action for decades, and serious carbon drawdown till the second half of this century, the brutal fact is that present greenhouse gas levels are such that we will steam past 1.5°C, and are heading to 2°C as a result of what we have already done. And that is why all “1.5°C scenarios” actually “overshoot” to around 2°C before cooling the system by a theoretical, massive-scale carbon drawdown.<br /><br />It is possible and necessary to reduce the warming impacts of the short-lived gases impacts, which is <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/39/10315.full">calculated</a> to be around 0.9°C, of which methane is the largest component. Half the methane emissions are natural, primarily from wetlands. And half are from human activities, the most important sources being extracting and processing fossil fuels (26-32%), livestock (26-28%), and landfills/waste (20-27%). Stopping the use of fossil fuels would reduce total methane emissions by 15%. Eliminating methane from animal husbandry and rice production would cut methane emissions by 20%. Together this impact would be around 0.3-4°C.<br /><br />On the other hand, it is expected non-anthropogenic methane emissions from wetlands and the Arctic will increase. If the planet warms enough, large polar permafrost and/or methane clathrate carbon stores will be mobilised, releasing large amounts of both methane and CO2, and introducing large positive feedbacks to long-term climate change. In February 2013, scientists using radiometric dating techniques on Russian cave formations to measure melting rates <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/340/6129/183">warned</a> that a 1.5ºC global rise in temperature was enough to start a general permafrost melt. <br /><br />The resilience of natural carbon sinks is deteriorating, and there is also <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6360/230">evidence</a> that carbon stores in tropical rainforests are now flipping to become sources of carbon, both CO2 and methane.<br /><br />So the work by Samset &nbsp;and his colleagues has added new understanding as to where the climate system is heading, even as we reduce fossil fuel use.<br /><br />If &nbsp;large-scale methane emissions reduction are difficult due to human system inertia and/or non-anthropogenic increases, or if carbon cycle feedbacks kick in as they now appear to be starting to do in both in the tropics and at the poles, then we are heading past 2°C by mid-century, regardless of whether we continue on a high-emissions path, or on a zero-emissions path that also unravels the aerosol cooling.<br /><br />It is also possible to deploy carbon drawdown, but this is not yet available at sufficient scale to meet the Paris schema, and research funding has so far been grossly inadequate. (Removing around 150 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere would reduce warming by ~0.1°C.) The storage of atmospheric carbon envisaged in the Paris agreement –– which delays emissions reductions now in favour of high levels of carbon drawdown much later in the century –– is enormous. Some of the world’s leading scientists <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000392/abstract">recently noted</a> that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The scale of the decarbonisation challenge to meet the Paris Agreement is underplayed in the public arena. It will require precipitous emissions reductions within 40 years and a new carbon sink on the scale of the ocean sink. Even then, the world is extremely likely to overshoot. A catastrophic failure of policy, for example, waiting another decade for transformative policy and full commitments to fossil-free economies, will have irreversible and deleterious repercussions for humanity's remaining time on Earth.</blockquote>Thus, without solar radiation management (replacing anthropogenic aerosols from fossil fuel use with anthropogenic aerosols spread from planes or fired into the atmosphere) it will be difficult to avoid 2°C no matter what CO2 emissions path we take, and all but impossible not to overshoot 1.5°C by at least a third. It is not yet clear that there is demonstrable clear net environmental benefit from solar radiation management, and we should only do it if that is the case. But in not doing it, we need to be honest about what will be lost and what further tipping points may be crossed. <br /><br />And all the above figures are based on a late-19th-century baseline, not true pre-industrial <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3345">which could add ~0.2°C</a> to the figures.<br /><br />The numbers from Samset et al. are close to those of <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/39/10315.full">Xu and Ramanathan</a>, who found that by 2015, the combined effect of CO2 and short-lived climate pollutants impact was 1.9°C, less total aerosol forcing of 0.9°C, resulting in the observed warming of 1°C. It is also close to <a href="https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/15/8201/2015/acp-15-8201-2015.html">Baker, Collins et al</a>, who found elimination of aerosols would result in warming of 0.82°C (average across 3 models). And it accords with work published in 2013 by <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/011006/meta">Hansen and others</a> which found that aerosol cooling probably reduced global warming "by about half over the past century".<br /><br />The work by Samset et al. also looks at the impact of aerosol removal on rainfall and extreme weather. It finds that precipitation increases 2–4.6%, and extreme weather indices also increase. There is a higher sensitivity of extreme events to aerosol reductions, per degree of surface warming, in particular over the major aerosol emission regions such as China and India.<br /><br />The problems posed are wickedly exquisite. The former NASA climate science chief James Hansen has long warned that 2°C is a “recipe for disaster”. It is clear that we now face an <a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath">existential threat </a>to human civilisation as the climate teeters on the edge of passing further system tipping points that would make the task of avoiding that threat tremendously difficult. <br /><br />This requires an emergency response, where we as a society are actually prepared to say openly and often that the scenarios outlined above are real and alarming, and take action accordingly. In Ireland, a <a href="https://greennews.ie/ban-ban-fossil-fuel-exploaration-dail-february/">Climate Emergency Measures Bill</a> to be debated this month seeks to ban any new explorations for oil, coal, and gas on Irish territory. The bill was introduced by People before Profit (PBP) Deputy Brid Smith last November, where it successfully passed the first stage. That would be one early step in an emergency approach.<br /><br />As Alex Steffen has <a href="https://thenearlynow.com/the-last-decade-and-you-489a5375fbe8">recently written</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The (emissions reduction) curve we’ve been forced onto bends so steeply, that the pace of victory is part of victory itself. Winning slowly is basically the same thing as losing outright. We cannot afford to pursue past strategies, aimed at limited gains towards distant goals. In the face of both triumphant denialism and predatory delay, trying to achieve climate action by doing the same things, the same old ways, means defeat. It guarantees defeat.</blockquote>http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/02/quantifying-our-faustian-bargain-with.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-6656927666314431036Mon, 22 Jan 2018 02:43:00 +00002018-01-22T13:43:22.349+11:00climate sensitivityNew study on climate sensitivity not what poor media headlines, deniers are saying<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZXa0YPf6PKg/WmVNzim2FUI/AAAAAAAAABk/HRYS8IdmezEZjWVw5Q9pIzdv-QUHiV1AwCLcBGAs/s1600/Climate_Sensitivity_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="500" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZXa0YPf6PKg/WmVNzim2FUI/AAAAAAAAABk/HRYS8IdmezEZjWVw5Q9pIzdv-QUHiV1AwCLcBGAs/s320/Climate_Sensitivity_500.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Courtesy <a href="https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm">Skeptical Science</a></td></tr></tbody></table>One swallow doesn't make a spring, and nor does one scientific paper change a whole body of evidence. But you could be mistaken for thinking so after the poor media coverage last week of a new piece of climate research.<br /><br />A study published last week in <i>Nature</i> (<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25450">"Emergent constraint on equilibrium climate sensitivity from global temperature variability"</a>) claims to tighten the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), range for (short-term) Estimated Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the amount of warming to be expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide&nbsp; (CO2) in the atmosphere.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />The study puts its best guess at 2.8C, which is pretty squarely in the middle of what scientists have thought all along. It also affirms that the best-case scenario of little-to-no warming, which deniers point to as justification for inaction, is unlikely, as are the worst-case, “black swan” scenarios.<br /><br />But because the AFP write-up was framed around the worst-case scenarios being “not credible,” deniers are celebrating the study as some sort of win.<br /><br />Now this study, and particularly AFP’s coverage, isn’t particularly helpful from either a scientific or a communications standpoint. For one thing, <b>it’s based on recent short-term variation, not thousands of years of temperature data, like other paleo-climate based ECS studies</b>. Plus, it uses a <b>brand new modeling methodology</b>--not exactly a tried-and-true approach. But apparently those who rail against climate models as hopelessly inaccurate will eagerly believe model outputs if they think it supports their denial.<br /><br />Then there’s the whole <b>“single-study-syndrome”</b> issue, so we should take the findings with a grain of salt, especially given other recent studies putting ECS at the higher end of what’s likely. This new modeling exercise <b>doesn’t take tipping points into account,</b> meaning that – oops – those worst-case scenarios are still very much on the table if steady warming triggers rapid changes in glacier melt or ocean circulations or any other unexpected surprises.<br /><br />[For more on climate sensitivity and long-term feedbacks, see <a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2014/08/dangerous-climate-change-myths-and_24.html">here</a> or check out pp 12-13 or our recent report on the scientific understatment of climate risks, <a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath"><b>What Lies Beneath</b></a>. <br /><br />And as we <a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/01/what-we-learned-about-climate-system-in.html">discussed last week</a>, two significant pieces of work released towards the end of 2017 suggest that warming is likely to be greater than the projections of the IPCC, on which climate policy-making and carbon budgets are generally based. This is because ECS, an estimate of how much the planet will warm for a doubling in the level of greenhouse gases, is higher than the median of the IPCC’s modelling analysis:<br /><ul><li>In <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672"><b>“Greater future global warming inferred from Earth’s recent energy budget”</b></a> published in <i>Nature</i> in December 2017, Brown and Caldeira compared the performance of a wide range of climate models (raw model projections) with recent observations (especially on the balance of incoming and outgoing top-of-the-atmosphere radiation that ultimately determines the Earth’s temperature), in order to assess which models perform best. The models that best capture current conditions (the “observationally-informed” models) produce 15% more warming by 2100 than the IPCC suggests, hence reducing the “carbon budget” by around 15% for the 2C target.</li><li>In <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/39/10315.full"><b>“Well below 2C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes”</b></a>, published in September 2017, Xu and Ramanathan look at what are called the “fat tail” risks. These are the low-probability, high-impact (LPHI) consequences (“fat tails”) of future emission scenarios; that is, events with a 5% probability at the top end of the range of possible outcomes. These “top end” risks are more likely to occur than we think. When these are taken into account, the researchers find that the ECS is more than 40% higher than the IPCC mid-figure, at 4.5-4.7°C. And this is without taking into account carbon cycle feedbacks (such as melting permafrost and the declining efficiency of forests carbon sinks), and increase methane emissions from wetlands, which together could add another 1°C to warming be 2100.</li></ul>Now those two papers don't change the whole body of evidence about climate sensitivity. but they amongst an increasing number that conclude that ECS may be at the higher end of the IPCC range, especially when the so-called "longer-term" feedbacks (which are actually kicking in in relatively short time frames) are taken into account.&nbsp; <br /><br />With thanks to Climate Central <br /><br />http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/01/new-study-on-climate-sensitivity-not.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-6875121602546924465Thu, 18 Jan 2018 21:06:00 +00002018-01-19T08:06:24.139+11:00Displacing coal with wood for power generation will worsen climate change, say researchers<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0WnMXqrrB8A/WmARUy0swcI/AAAAAAAAABI/monWvztaK8scw2kp79-8CSe1P6vyvxKuACLcBGAs/s1600/Drax.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="800" height="250" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0WnMXqrrB8A/WmARUy0swcI/AAAAAAAAABI/monWvztaK8scw2kp79-8CSe1P6vyvxKuACLcBGAs/s400/Drax.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Drax facility in North Yorkshire has transitioned some of its coal power generation capacity to wood pellets with the support of UK government subsidies</td></tr></tbody></table>New research has challenged the view that wood bioenergy is carbon neutral, and shows that wood pellets burned in European and UK power plants actually emit more carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilowatt hour than that generated by coal. <br /><br />This is because wood is both less efficient at the point of combustion and has larger processing and supply chain emissions than coal. Their research shows that using wood instead of coal in power generation increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, worsening climate change until—and only if—the harvested forests regrow. <br /><a name='more'></a>Wood is increasingly being used to replace coal as a source of electricity generation in many regions such as the European Union (EU), where policymakers have declared it “carbon neutral.” However, researchers at MIT, Climate Interactive, and UMass Lowell reveal that displacing coal with wood for power generation can make climate change worse for many decades or more.&nbsp; <br /><br />In the new study, <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512/pdf"><b>“Does replacing coal with wood lower CO2 emissions? Dynamic lifecycle analysis of wood bioenergy”</b></a>, the researchers examine the climate impact of replacing coal power generation in the EU and the UK with wood pellets sourced from forests in the southern United States. The research is published today in <i>Environmental Research Letters</i>. (The paper can be accessed online at <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512/pdf">http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512/pdf</a> )<br /><br />US forests are a main source for EU wood pellet imports, which have been rising as demand has grown. These forests grow back slowly, so it takes a long time to repay the initial “carbon debt” incurred by burning wood instead of coal. For forests in the central and eastern US, which supply much of the wood used in UK power plants, the payback time for this carbon debt ranges from 44 to 104 years, depending on forest type—and assuming the land remains forest. If the land is developed, or converted to agricultural use, then the carbon debt is never repaid and grows over time as the harvested land emits additional carbon from soils. <br /><br />Lead researcher Prof. John Sterman sums up the findings this way: “It’s like an investment in which you give your bank $1,000 today. They promise to pay you back, but only over 80 years, and only if they don’t go out of business first or decide there’s something else they’d rather spend your money on. You’re better off if you keep your money. In the same way, it’s better to keep the trees on the land and keep all that carbon out of the atmosphere.”<br /><br />The researchers also explored an increasingly common scenario in which hardwood forests harvested for bioenergy are replaced with faster-growing loblolly pine plantations. Surprisingly, replanting with fast-growing pine plantations worsens the CO2 impact of wood because managed plantations do not sequester as much carbon as natural forests.<br /><br />They also found that continued growth in wood use, as many predict, will worsen climate change throughout the rest of this century, or longer.&nbsp; This is because the first impact of substituting wood for coal in power generation is an increase in CO2 emissions.&nbsp; Even if the forests eventually regrow, notes Prof. Sterman, each year the new carbon debt from increased harvest and combustion outweighs the regrowth, just as borrowing more on a credit card each month than one is able to pay back will steadily increase what he or she owes. For countries using wood bioenergy as a component of their climate policies this could take them backwards. Indeed, <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Renewable_energy_statistics">bioenergy from wood made up 44% of the EU’s renewable energy&nbsp;production in 2015</a>.<br /><br />"We’re seeing many of the countries, states, and even institutions leading on climate embracing bioenergy from wood because they think it is ‘carbon neutral.’ Our analysis shows that these good intentions may be leading to outcomes that are bad for the climate: net carbon emissions that are worse than coal for many decades and, potentially, for the rest of this century or more,” says co-author Juliette Prof. Rooney-Varga.<br /><br />Porf. Sterman says, “A&nbsp;molecule of CO2&nbsp;emitted today has the same impact on the climate whether it comes from coal or biomass. Declaring that biofuels are carbon neutral, as the EU, UK and others have done, erroneously assumes forest regrowth happens quickly and fully offsets the emissions from biofuel production and combustion. One way to address the challenges raised in this study would be to count emissions where they occur, for example, at a power plant, and monitor and count carbon removed from the atmosphere by regrowth on the harvested land.” <br /><br />Critically, the analysis does not support continued coal use as it is the most carbon intensive fuel and a major contributor to climate change. The researchers stress energy efficiency, solar, wind and storage as the cheapest, safest, and quickest ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions while providing the goods and services people need. <br /><br /><br />http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/01/displacing-coal-with-wood-for-power.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-4255335221855692529Sun, 14 Jan 2018 22:49:00 +00002018-01-15T09:49:15.133+11:00carbon budgetclimate sensitivityscientific reticenceWhat we learned about the climate system in 2017 that should send shivers down the spines of policy makers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fOUPchSqfNY/WlVghJe5IWI/AAAAAAAAAAw/e0bqiYZNkecj-6d8QR6hM-YJelv7xiFiwCLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2018-01-10%2Bat%2B11.37.28%2BAM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="582" height="312" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fOUPchSqfNY/WlVghJe5IWI/AAAAAAAAAAw/e0bqiYZNkecj-6d8QR6hM-YJelv7xiFiwCLcBGAs/s400/Screen%2BShot%2B2018-01-10%2Bat%2B11.37.28%2BAM.png" width="400" /></a></div><b>by David Spratt</b><br /><br />Much of what happened in 2017 was predictable: news of climate extremes became, how can I put it … almost the norm. There was record-breaking heat on several continents, California’s biggest wildfire (extraordinarily in the middle of winter), an ex-tropical cyclone hitting Ireland (yes, Ireland) in October, and the unprecedented Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria that swept through the Atlantic in August. The US government agency, the NOAA, <a href="https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events/US/2017">reported</a> that there were 16 catastrophic billion-dollar weather/climate events in the USA during 2017.<br /><br />And 2017 “marks the first time some of the (scientific) papers concluded that an event could not have occurred — like, at all — in a world where global warming did not exist. The studies suggested that the record-breaking global temperatures in 2016, an extreme heat wave in Asia and a patch of unusually warm water in the Alaskan Gulf were only possible because of human-caused climate change”, Reuters <a href="https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060069603">reported.</a><br /><a name='more'></a> <br />At both poles, the news continues to be not good. At the COP23 in Bonn, Pam Pearson, Founder and Director of the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7z61UZoppM&amp;feature=youtu.be">warned </a>that the cryoshere is becoming “an irreversible driver of climate change”. She said that most cryosphere thresholds are determined by peak temperature, and the length of time spent at that peak, warning that “later, decreasing temperatures after the peak are largely irrelevant, especially with higher temperatures and longer duration peaks”. Thus “overshoot scenarios”, which are now becoming the norm in policy-making circles (including all 1.5°C scenarios) hold much greater risks.<br /><br />As well, Pearson said that&nbsp; 2100 is a misleading and minimising measure of cryosphere response: “When setting goals, it is important to look to new irreversible impacts and the steady state circumstances. The end of the century is too soon to show that before but inevitable response especially for sea level rises.” Pearson added that: “What keeps cryosphere scientists up at night are irreversible thresholds, particularly West Antarctica and Greenland. The consensus figure for the irreversible melting of Greenland is at 1.6°C.”<br /><br />So what did we learn about the climate system in 2017? Here’s three that stand out, that should send shivers down the spines of policy makers. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>1.&nbsp; 2017 was the second hottest year on record and the hottest non-El Nino year on record</b></span><br /><br />Whilst not all sources have yet released data on annual warming for last year, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the first major international weather agency to report global 2017 temperatures, said they averaged 1.2°C above pre-industrial times. 2017 was slightly cooler than the warmest year on record, 2016, and warmer than the previous second warmest year, 2015, Reuters <a href="http://reported./">reported.</a><br /><br />Other organisations have unofficial figures which either agree with this assessment, or say that 2017 has tied with 2015. And last year was <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-10/annual-climate-statement-2017-third-hottest-year-on-record/9314364">Australia's third-warmest year on record</a>.<br /><br />It is no surprise that the last three years have been the hottest on the instrumental record. What is remarkable is that 2017 was as hot, or hotter than 2015, because 2015 and 2016 were both El Nino years, and the evidence shows that El Nino years are, on average, <a href="https://skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=67">about 0.15°C warmer</a> than La Nina years.<br /><br />In fact, a remarkably hot 2017 <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/2017-major-temperature-record-f9ac8177d863/">crushed the old record</a> for hottest non-El Niño year (2014) by an astounding 0.17°C.<br /><br />The underlying temperature trend is being driven by continuing high levels of climate pollution: The UN <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-greenhouse/carbon-dioxide-levels-grew-at-record-pace-in-2016-u-n-says-idUSKBN1CZ0YB">says </a>carbon dioxide levels grew at record pace in 2016. The atmospheric carbon dioxide&nbsp; averaged 403.3 parts per million (ppm) over the year, up from 400 ppm in 2015. The growth rate was 50 percent faster than the average over the past decade.<br /><br />And global carbon emissions are headed up again after three years in which human-caused emissions appeared to be levelling off. A two percent increase is projected overall, with the highest rise coming in China, according to <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12112017/climate-change-carbon-co2-emissions-record-high-2017-cop23">new research </a>presented at the climate talks in Bonn.<br /><br />In 2017 we also <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5100933/There-NO-pause-global-warming.htm">learned </a>that there was no pause in global warming: the so-called ’slow down' in climate change between 1998 and 2012 was caused by a lack of data from the Arctic.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>2. It is likely to get hotter than we think</b></span><br /><br />Two significant pieces of work released towards the end of 2017 suggest that warming is likely to be greater than the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which climate policy-making and carbon budgets are generally based. <br /><br />This is because what is called Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), an estimate of how much the planet will warm for a doubling in the level of greenhouse gases, is higher than the median of the IPCC’s modelling analysis. <br /><br />In <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672"><b>“Greater future global warming inferred from Earth’s recent energy budget”</b></a> published in <i>Nature</i> in December 2017, Brown and Caldeira compared the performance of a wide range of climate models (raw model projections) with recent observations (especially on the balance of incoming and outgoing top-of-the-atmosphere radiation that ultimately determines the Earth’s temperature), in order to assess which models perform best.<br /><br />The models that best capture current conditions (the “observationally-informed” models) produce 15% more warming by 2100 than the IPCC suggests, hence reducing the “carbon budget” by around 15% for the 2C target.<br /><br />&nbsp;For example, they find the warming associated by the IPCC with RCP 4.5 emissions scenario would in fact “follow the trajectory previously associated with (higher emissions) RCP 6.0” scenario. <br /><br />They also find that the observationally-informed ECS prediction has a mean value of 3.7°C (for a doubling of the atmospheric greenhouse gas level), compared to 3.1°C used in raw models, and in the carbon budget analyses widely used by the IPCC, the UN and at climate policy conferences.<br /><br />In <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/114/39/10315.full"><b>“Well below 2C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes”</b></a>, published in September 2017, Xu and Ramanathan look at what are called the “fat tail” risks. These are the low-probability, high-impact (LPHI) consequences (“fat tails”) of future emission scenarios; that is, events with a 5% probability at the top end of the range of possible outcomes.&nbsp;<br /><br />These “top end” risks are more likely to occur than we think, so “it is important to use high-end climate sensitivity because some studies have suggested that 3D climate models have underestimated three major positive climate feedbacks: positive ice albedo feedback from the retreat of Arctic sea ice, positive cloud albedo feedback from retreating storm track clouds in mid-latitudes, and positive albedo feedback by the mixed-phase (water and ice) clouds.” <br /><br />When these are taken into account, the researchers find that the ECS is more than 40% higher than the IPCC mid-figure, at 4.5-4.7°C. And this is without taking into account carbon cycle feedbacks (such as melting permafrost and the declining efficiency of forests carbon sinks), and increase methane emissions from wetlands, which together could add another 1°C to warming be 2100. <br /><br />This work compliments other recent work which also suggests a higher climate sensitivity:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6108/792">Fasullo and Trenberth</a> found that the climate models that most accurately capture observed relative humidity in the tropics and subtropics and associated clouds were among those with a higher sensitivity of around 4°C. </li><li><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065911/full">Zhai et al.</a> found that seven models that are consistent with the observed seasonal variation of low-altitude marine clouds yield an ensemble-mean sensitivity of 3.9°C. </li><li><a href="http://‘Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming">Friedrich et al.</a> show that climate models may be underestimating climate sensitivity because it is not uniform across different circumstances, but in fact higher in warmer, inter-glacial periods (such as the present) and lower in colder, glacial periods. Based on a study of glacial cycles and temperatures over the last 800,000 years, the authors conclude that in warmer periods climate sensitivity averages around 4.88°C. Professor Michael Mann, of Penn State University, <a href="https://inhabitat.com/scientists-say-trumps-presidency-could-lead-to-a-game-over-scenario/">says</a> the paper appears "sound and the conclusions quite defensible".</li><li><a href="http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3666.1">Lauer et al.</a> found that climate models that most accurately simulate recent cloud cover changes in the east Pacific point to an amplifying effect on global warming and thus a more sensitive climate.&nbsp; </li></ul>And the bottom line?&nbsp; If this work is correct, then the pledges made under the Paris Accord would not produce warming of around 3°C as is widely discussed, but a figure closer to and even above&nbsp; 4°C. And the total carbon budget would a quarter smaller than is generally accepted, or even less.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>3. Climate models under-estimate future risks</b></span><br /><br />This year, the Breakthrough Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne, published <a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath"><b>What Lies Beneath</b></a>, on the scientific understatement of climate risks. The report found that human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation, yet much climate research understates climate risks and provides conservative projections. Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that are crucial to climate policymaking and informing public narrative are characterised by scientific reticence, paying limited attention to lower-probability, high-risk events that are becoming increasingly likely. (Disclosure: I was a co-author of this report.) <br /><br />But don’t take my word.&nbsp; At the climate policy conference in Bonn, Phil Duffy, the Director of the Woods Hole Institute, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7z61UZoppM&amp;feature=youtu.be">explained</a> the scientific reticence regarding the biggest system feedback issues:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The best example of reticence is permafrost…&nbsp; It’s absolutely essential that this feedback loop not get going seriously, if it does there is simply no way to control it… The scientific failure comes in because none of this is in climate models and none of this is considered in the climate policy discussion… climate models simply omit emissions from the warming permafrost, but we know that is the wrong answer because that tacitly assumes that these emissions are zero and we know that’s not right…</blockquote>And the problems of underestimation of future climate impacts from current models was explicitly recognised by the US government in its <b><a href="https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/15/">Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment</a></b>. In a chapter on “Potential Surprises: Compound Extremes and Tipping Element”, two key findings were:<br /><ul><li>Positive feedbacks (self-reinforcing cycles) within the climate system have the potential to accelerate human-induced climate change and even shift the Earth’s climate system, in part or in whole, into new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past (for example, ones with greatly diminished ice sheets or different large-scale patterns of atmosphere or ocean circulation). Some feedbacks and potential state shifts can be modeled and quantified; others can be modeled or identified but not quantified; and some are probably still unknown. (Very high confidence in the potential for state shifts and in the incompleteness of knowledge about feedbacks and potential state shifts).</li><li>While climate models incorporate important climate processes that can be well quantified, they do not include all of the processes that can contribute to feedbacks, compound extreme events, and abrupt and/or irreversible changes. For this reason, future changes outside the range projected by climate models cannot be ruled out (very high confidence). Moreover, the systematic tendency of climate models to underestimate temperature change during warm paleoclimates suggests that climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change (medium confidence). </li></ul>The problem is that the notion that future climate changes may be faster and hotter than those projected by climate models is one rarely understood by climate policy-makers, and rarely discussed by those who do understand.<br /><br />If climate policymaking is to be soundly based, a re-framing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required. This must be taken up not just in the work of the IPCC, but also in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations if we are to address the real climate challenge.http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/01/what-we-learned-about-climate-system-in.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-3837813483312113987Tue, 21 Nov 2017 22:28:00 +00002017-11-22T09:28:28.450+11:00 Ice Apocalypse: How the rapid collapse of Antarctic glaciers could flood coastal cities by the end of this centuryby <b>Eric Holthaus</b>, <a href="https://grist.org/article/antarctica-doomsday-glaciers-could-flood-coastal-cities/" target="_blank">Grist </a><br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-08LyNti1cio/WhSmD4KxoBI/AAAAAAAAB-I/iL-jcmMXDDYheW4PjLJBoykQTm0vca4owCLcBGAs/s1600/pigshelfedge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="495" data-original-width="330" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-08LyNti1cio/WhSmD4KxoBI/AAAAAAAAB-I/iL-jcmMXDDYheW4PjLJBoykQTm0vca4owCLcBGAs/s400/pigshelfedge.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pine Island Glacier shelf edge. <span class="credit">Jeremy Harbeck</span></td></tr></tbody></table>In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage.<br /><br />Stretching across a frozen plain more than 150 miles long, these glaciers, named Pine Island and Thwaites, have marched steadily for millennia toward the Amundsen Sea, part of the vast Southern Ocean. Further inland, the glaciers widen into a two-mile-thick reserve of ice covering an area the size of Texas.<br /><br />There’s no doubt this ice will melt as the world warms. The vital question is when.<br /><br />The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. (A Rolling Stone feature earlier this year dubbed Thwaites “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-doomsday-glacier-w481260">The Doomsday Glacier</a>.”) Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. For that reason, finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today.<br /><br /><br /><a name='more'></a>To figure that out, scientists have been looking back to the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago, when global temperatures stood at roughly their current levels. The bad news? There’s growing evidence that the Pine Island Bay glaciers collapsed rapidly back then, flooding the world’s coastlines — partially the result of something called “marine ice-cliff instability.”<br /><br />The ocean floor gets deeper toward the center of this part of Antarctica, so each new iceberg that breaks away exposes taller and taller cliffs. Ice gets so heavy that these taller cliffs can’t support their own weight. Once they start to crumble, the destruction would be unstoppable.<br /><br />“Ice is only so strong, so it will collapse if these cliffs reach a certain height,” explains Kristin Poinar, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We need to know how fast it’s going to happen.”<br /><br />In the past few years, scientists have identified marine ice-cliff instability as a feedback loop that could kickstart the disintegration of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet this century — much more quickly than previously thought.<br /><br />Minute-by-minute, huge skyscraper-sized shards of ice cliffs would crumble into the sea, as tall as the Statue of Liberty and as deep underwater as the height of the Empire State Building. The result: a global catastrophe the likes of which we’ve never seen.<br /><br />Ice comes in many forms, with different consequences when it melts. Floating ice, like the kind that covers the Arctic Ocean in wintertime and comprises ice shelves, doesn’t raise sea levels. (Think of a melting ice cube, which won’t cause a drink to spill over.)<br /><br />Land-based ice, on the other hand, is much more troublesome. When it falls into the ocean, it adds to the overall volume of liquid in the seas. Thus, sea-level rise.<br /><br />Antarctica is a giant landmass — about half the size of Africa — and the ice that covers it averages more than a mile thick. Before human burning of fossil fuels triggered global warming, the continent’s ice was in relative balance: The snows in the interior of the continent roughly matched the icebergs that broke away from glaciers at its edges.<br /><br />Now, as carbon dioxide traps more heat in the atmosphere and warms the planet, the scales have tipped.<br /><br />A wholesale collapse of Pine Island and Thwaites would set off a catastrophe. Giant icebergs would stream away from Antarctica like a parade of frozen soldiers. All over the world, high tides would creep higher, slowly burying every shoreline on the planet, flooding coastal cities and creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zr82UjAcxdU/WhSmWntM4jI/AAAAAAAAB-M/jw44WzxDKIgDLOA7hqMVTmFIGr2euBw2wCLcBGAs/s1600/pineislandcalvingfront.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="225" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zr82UjAcxdU/WhSmWntM4jI/AAAAAAAAB-M/jw44WzxDKIgDLOA7hqMVTmFIGr2euBw2wCLcBGAs/s400/pineislandcalvingfront.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pine Island Glacier calving front. NASA ICE</td></tr></tbody></table>&nbsp;All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years — much too quickly for humanity to adapt.<br />“With marine ice cliff instability, sea-level rise for the next century is potentially much larger than we thought it might be five or 10 years ago,” Poinar says.<br /><br />A lot of this newfound concern is driven by the research of two climatologists: Rob DeConto at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and David Pollard at Penn State University. A study <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17145">they published last year</a> was the first to incorporate the latest understanding of marine ice-cliff instability into a continent-scale model of Antarctica.<br /><br />Their results drove estimates for how high the seas could rise this century sharply higher. “Antarctic model raises prospect of unstoppable ice collapse,” read <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/antarctic-model-raises-prospect-of-unstoppable-ice-collapse-1.19638">the headline in the scientific journal Nature</a>, a publication not known for hyperbole.<br /><br />Instead of a three-foot increase in ocean levels by the end of the century, six feet was more likely, according to DeConto and Pollard’s findings. But if carbon emissions continue to track on something resembling a worst-case scenario, the full 11 feet of ice locked in West Antarctica might be freed up, their study showed.<br /><br />Three feet of sea-level rise would be bad, leading to more frequent flooding of U.S. cities such as New Orleans, Houston, New York, and Miami. Pacific Island nations, like the Marshall Islands, would lose most of their territory. Unfortunately, it now seems like three feet is possible <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/27/us/nasa-rising-sea-levels/index.html">only under the rosiest of scenarios</a>.<br /><br />At six feet, though, around 12 million people in the United States would be displaced, and the world’s most vulnerable megacities, like Shanghai, Mumbai, and Ho Chi Minh City, could be wiped off the map.<br /><br />At 11 feet, land currently inhabited by <a href="http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/news/global-mapping-choices">hundreds of millions of people </a>worldwide would wind up underwater. South Florida would be largely uninhabitable; floods on the scale of Hurricane Sandy would strike twice a month in New York and New Jersey, as the tug of the moon alone would be enough to send tidewaters into homes and buildings.<br /><br />DeConto and Pollard’s breakthrough came from <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X14007961">trying to match</a> observations of ancient sea levels at shorelines around the world with current ice sheet behavior.<br /><br />Around 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were about as warm as they’re expected to be later this century, oceans were dozens of feet higher than today.<br /><br />Previous models suggested that it would take hundreds or thousands of years for sea-level rise of that magnitude to occur. But once they accounted for marine ice-cliff instability, DeConto and Pollard’s model pointed toward a catastrophe if the world maintains a “business as usual” path — meaning we don’t dramatically reduce carbon emissions.<br /><br />Rapid cuts in greenhouse gases, however, showed Antarctica remaining almost completely intact for hundreds of years.<br /><br />Pollard and DeConto are the first to admit that their model is still crude, but its results have pushed the entire scientific community into emergency mode.<br /><br />“It could happen faster or slower, I don’t think we really know yet,” says Jeremy Bassis, a leading ice sheet scientist at the University of Michigan. “But it’s within the realm of possibility, and that’s kind of a scary thing.”<br /><br />Scientists used to think that ice sheets could take millennia to respond to changing climates. These are, after all, mile-thick chunks of ice.<br /><br />The new evidence, though, says that once a certain temperature threshold is reached, ice shelves of glaciers that extend into the sea, like those near Pine Island Bay, will begin to melt from both above and below, weakening their structure and hastening their demise, and paving the way for ice-cliff instability to kick in.<br /><br />In a new study out last month in the journal Nature, a team of scientists from Cambridge and Sweden point to evidence from thousands of scratches left by ancient icebergs on the ocean floor, indicating that Pine Island’s glaciers shattered in a relatively short amount of time at the end of the last ice age.<br /><br />The only place in the world where you can see ice-cliff instability in action today is at Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland, one of the fastest-collapsing glaciers in the world. DeConto says that to construct their model, they took the collapse rate of Jakobshavn, cut it in half to be extra conservative, then applied it to Thwaites and Pine Island.<br /><br />But there’s reason to think Thwaites and Pine Island could go even faster than Jakobshavn.<br />Right now, there’s a floating ice shelf protecting the two glaciers, helping to hold back the flow of ice into the sea. But recent examples from other regions, like the rapidly collapsing <a href="https://grist.org/article/antarcticas-collapsing-ice-shelf-just-sprouted-a-new-crack/">Larsen B ice shelf</a> on the Antarctic Peninsula, show that once ice shelves break apart as a result of warming, their parent glaciers start to flow faster toward the sea, an effect that can weaken the stability of ice further inland, too.<br /><br />“If you remove the ice shelf, there’s a potential that not just ice-cliff instabilities will start occurring, but a process called marine ice-sheet instabilities,” says Matthew Wise, a polar scientist at the University of Cambridge.<br /><br />This signals the possible rapid destabilization of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet in this century. “Once the stresses exceed the strength of the ice,” Wise says, “it just falls off.”<br /><br />And, it’s not just Pine Island Bay. On our current course, other glaciers around Antarctica will be similarly vulnerable. And then there’s Greenland, which could contribute as much as 20 feet of sea-level rise if it melts.<br /><br />Next to a meteor strike, rapid sea-level rise from collapsing ice cliffs is one of the quickest ways our world can remake itself. This is about as fast as climate change gets.<br /><br />Still, some scientists aren’t fully convinced the alarm is warranted. Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, says the new research by Wise and his colleagues, which identified ice-cliff instabilities in Pine Island Bay 11,000 years ago, is “tantalizing evidence.” But he says that research doesn’t establish how quickly it happened.<br /><br />“There’s a whole lot more to understand if we’re going to use this mechanism to predict how far Thwaites glacier and the other glaciers are going to retreat,” he says. “The question boils down to, what are the brakes on this process?”<br /><br />Scambos thinks it is unlikely that Thwaites or Pine Island would collapse all at once. For one thing, if rapid collapse did happen, it would produce a pile of icebergs that could act like a temporary ice shelf, slowing down the rate of retreat.<br /><br /><br />Despite the differences of opinion, however, there’s growing agreement within the scientific community that we need to do much more to determine the risk of rapid sea-level rise. In 2015, the U.S. and U.K. governments began to plan a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/29/scientists-declare-an-urgent-mission-study-west-antarctica-and-fast/?utm_term=.35f6d92a7af1">rare and urgent joint research program</a> to study Thwaites glacier. Called “<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092181811630491X?via%3Dihub">How much, how fast?</a>,” the effort is set to begin early next year and run for five years.<br /><br />Seeing the two governments pooling their resources is “really a sign of the importance of research like this,” NASA’s Poinar says.<br /><br />Given what’s at stake, the research program at Thwaites isn’t enough, but it might be the most researchers can get. “Realistically, it’s probably all that can be done in the next five years in the current funding environment,” says Pollard.<br /><br />He’s referring, of course, to the Trump administration’s disregard for science and adequate scientific funding; the White House’s 2018 budget proposal includes <a href="https://grist.org/article/life-saving-weather-forecasts-cost-donald-trump-wants-to-slash-them/">the first-ever cut to the National Science Foundation</a>, which typically funds research in Antarctica.<br /><br />“It would be sensible to put a huge effort into this, from my perspective,” Pollard says. Structural engineers need to study Antarctica’s key glaciers as though they were analyzing a building, he says, probing for weak spots and understanding how exactly they might fail. “If you vastly increase the research now, [the cost] would still be trivial compared to the losses that might happen.”<br /><br />Bassis, the ice sheet scientist at the University of Michigan, first described the theoretical process of marine ice-cliff instability in research published only a few years ago.<br /><br /><br />He’s 40 years old, but his field has already changed enormously over the course of his career. In 2002, when Bassis was conducting his PhD research in a different region of Antarctica, he was shocked to return to his base camp and learn that the Larsen B ice shelf had vanished practically overnight.<br /><br />“Every revision to our understanding has said that ice sheets can change faster than we thought,” he says. “We didn’t predict that Pine Island was going to retreat, we didn’t predict that Larsen B was going to disintegrate. We tend to look at these things after they’ve happened.”<br /><br />There’s a recurring theme throughout these scientists’ findings in Antarctica: What we do now <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26102017/antarctica-sea-level-rise-ice-sheet-tipping-point-climate-change-study">will determine</a> how quickly Pine Island and Thwaites collapse. A fast transition away from fossil fuels in the next few decades could be enough to put off rapid sea-level rise for centuries. That’s a decision worth countless trillions of dollars and millions of lives.<br /><br />“The range of outcomes,” Bassis says, “is really going to depend on choices that people make.”http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/11/ice-apocalypse-how-rapid-collapse-of.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-3274016210951731251Sun, 01 Oct 2017 23:56:00 +00002017-10-15T01:12:29.852+11:00climate policy paradigmrisk managementPolicymakers need to look at the real climate risksBy <b>David Spratt</b> and <b>Ian Dunlop</b><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">This blog is an extract from <a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath" target="_blank"><i><b>What Lies Beneath: The scientific understatement of climate risks</b></i></a>, just published by Breakthrough, the National Centre for Climate Restoration.</blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tCa5sUV5ZGU/Wa6FgQLPTJI/AAAAAAAAB64/qaq3FLxfKQUqp4W6fDpyN8U0kPlpOf8_gCLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-09-05%2Bat%2B9.06.51%2BPM.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="753" data-original-width="533" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tCa5sUV5ZGU/Wa6FgQLPTJI/AAAAAAAAB64/qaq3FLxfKQUqp4W6fDpyN8U0kPlpOf8_gCLcBGAs/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-09-05%2Bat%2B9.06.51%2BPM.png" width="226" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath" target="_blank">Download report</a></td></tr></tbody></table>The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are the twin climate processes of the United Nations.<br /><br />Conferences of the Parties (COPs) under the UNFCCC are political fora, populated by professional representatives of national governments, and subject to the diplomatic processes of negotiation, trade-offs and deals. In this sense, the COPs are similar in process to that of the IPCC by which the <i>Summary for Policymakers</i> is agreed. The decision-making is<br />inclusive (by consensus), making outcomes hostage to national interests and lowest-common-denominator politics.<br /><br />The COP 21 <a href="https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/l09r01.pdf" target="_blank"><i>Paris Agreement</i></a> is almost devoid of substantive language on the cause of human-induced climate change and contains no reference to “coal”, “oil”, “fracking”, “shale oil”, “fossil fuel” or “carbon dioxide”, nor to the words “zero”, “ban”, “prohibit” or “stop”. By way of comparison, the term “adaptation” occurs more than eighty times in 31 pages, though responsibility for forcing others to adapt is not mentioned, and both liability and compensation are explicitly excluded. The Agreement has a goal but no firm action plan, and bureaucratic jargon abounds, including the terms “enhance” and “capacity” appearing more than fifty times each.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />&nbsp;The proposed emission cuts by individual nations under the Paris Agreement are voluntary (unilateral), without an enforceable compliance mechanism. In this sense, the Agreement cannot be considered “binding” on signatories. The voluntary national emission reduction commitments are not critically analysed in the Agreement , but noted to be inadequate for limiting warming to 2°C.<br /><br />The Paris voluntary national commitments would result in emissions in 2030 being higher than in 2015 and are consistent with a 3°C warming path, and significantly higher if the warming impacts of carbon-cycle feedbacks are considered. Unless dramatically improved upon, the present commitments exclude the attainment of either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets this century without wholly unrealistic assumptions about negative emissions.<br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""></http:></https:><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><br /><b>GOALS ABANDONED</b><br /><br />The UNFCCC <a href="http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/items/6036.php" target="_blank">primary goal </a>is to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system". But what is “dangerous”? Traditionally, policymakers have focused on the 2°C target, but the Paris Agreement emphasises “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.<br />&nbsp;</http:></https:><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int="">With the experience of global warming impacts so far, scientists have <a href="http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/20" target="_blank">distinguished</a> between "dangerous" (1-2°C band) and “extremely dangerous" (above 2°C) climate warming.</http:></https:><br /><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""></http:></https:><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W9ghP4oavm0/Wa-fOKi2dCI/AAAAAAAAB8A/k2fP6fchzoUXy5yB79dyMKqZx6J04r38QCLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-09-06%2Bat%2B5.09.18%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="845" data-original-width="1211" height="278" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W9ghP4oavm0/Wa-fOKi2dCI/AAAAAAAAB8A/k2fP6fchzoUXy5yB79dyMKqZx6J04r38QCLcBGAs/s400/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-09-06%2Bat%2B5.09.18%2BPM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int="">But we now have evidence that significant tipping points –– for example, summer sea-ice free Arctic conditions, the loss of West Antarctic glaciers and a multi-metre sea-level rise –– have very likely been passed at less than 1°C of warming. As&nbsp; well, evidence is accumulating that around the current level of warming more elements of the system may be heading towards tipping points or experiencing qualitative change. These include the slowing of the major ocean current known as the Atlantic conveyor, likely as a result of climate change; accelerating ice-mass loss from Greenland; declining carbon efficiency of the Amazon forests and other sinks; and the vulnerability of Arctic permafrost stores.</http:></https:><br /><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int="">Warming of 1.5°C would set sea-level rises in train sufficient to challenge significant components of human civilisation, besides reducing the world’s coral ecosystems to remnant structures.<br /><br />In other words, climate change is already dangerous, but the UNFCCC processes have not acknowledged this reality, proposing higher warming targets as policy goals. Nor has the IPCC process, with its lags in its publication process, and a “burning embers” representation of the risks that again looks <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n1/full/nclimate3179.html?foxtrotcallback=true" target="_blank">too conservative</a>.<br /><br />An expert panel recently concluded that warming would need to be <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017%200728-gxkwph.html" target="_blank">limited to 1.2°C</a> to save the Great Barrier Reef.80 That is probably too optimistic, but with a warming trend of 1.05–1.1°C and 2016 global average warming above 1.2°C, it also demonstrates that climate change is already dangerous.<br /><br />The question as to what would be safe for the protection of people and other species is not addressed by policymakers. If climate change is already dangerous, then by setting the 1.5°C and 2°C targets, the UNFCCC process has abandoned the goal of preventing “dangerous anthropogenic influence with the climate system”.<br /><br />The UNFCCC key goals ”to ensure that food production is not threatened" and achieving "a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change" have been discarded for all practical purposes. Food production is already threatened by rising sea levels and inundation, shifting rainfall patterns and desertification, and extreme heatwave and wildfire episodes. Such events became a <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2013/02/28/54579/the-arab-spring-and-climate-change/" target="_blank">driver of the “Arab Spring”</a> and a threat multiplier in the Syrian conflict and in Darfur.<http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""></http:></http:></https:><br /><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au="">Ecosystems including coral reefs, mangroves and kelp forests in Australia are degrading fast as the world's sixth mass extinction gathers pace. Major ecosystems are now severely degraded and climate policymakers have no realistic agreement to save or restore them, from the Arctic to the Amazon, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Sahel.</http:></http:></http:></https:><br /><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au="">The Paris Agreement recognised the “fundamental priority of safeguarding food security” (note the change from the original goal to “ensure” food production is not threatened). The Paris Agreement made no references to time-frames sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, suggesting this goal has been (literally) dropped.&nbsp;</http:></http:></http:></https:><br /><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au="">Because climate change is already dangerous, a reframing of the objective for international policymaking is required.<br /><br /><b>A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION</b></http:></http:></http:></https:><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au="">“Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it’s completely useless.”</http:></http:></http:></https:><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au="">— <a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/10/climate-change-four-degrees-of-devastation" target="_blank">Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber</a>, director of the Potsdam Institute</http:></http:></http:></https:><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au=""></http:></http:></http:></https:></blockquote><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au="">At the London School of Economics in 2008, Queen Elizabeth questioned: “Why did no one foresee the timing, extent and severity of the Global Financial Crisis?” The British Academy <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jul/26/monarchy-credit-crunch" target="_blank">answered</a> a year later: “A psychology of denial gripped the financial and corporate world… [it was] the failure of the collective imagination of many bright people… to understand the risks to the system as a whole.”<br /><br />A “failure of imagination” has also been identified as one of the reasons for the breakdown in US intelligence around the 9/11 attacks in 2001.<br /><br />A similar failure is occurring in our understanding of and response to climate change today.<br /><br />The problem is widespread at senior levels of government and global corporations. A 2016 report, <a href="http://www.thinkunthinkable.org/" target="_blank"><i>Thinking the unthinkable</i></a>, based on interviews with top leaders around the world, found that: “A proliferation of ‘unthinkable’ events… has revealed a new fragility at the highest levels of corporate and public service leaderships. Their ability to spot, identify and handle unexpected, non-normative events is… perilously inadequate at critical moments… Remarkably, there remains a deep reluctance, or what might be called ‘executive myopia’, to see and contemplate even the possibility that ‘unthinkables’ might happen, let alone how to handle them.”<br /><br />Such failures are manifested in two ways in climate policy. At the political, bureaucratic and business levels in the underplaying of the high-end risks and in failing to recognise that the existential risks of climate change is totally different from other risk categories. And at the research level, as embodied in IPCC reports, in underestimating climate change impacts, along with an under-emphasis on, and poor communication of, the high-end risks.&nbsp;</http:></http:></http:></https:><br /><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au="">The IPCC reports have not provided a sufficient evidentiary base to answer a key question for normative policymaking: what would be safe? As noted previously, IPCC processes paid little attention to less than 2°C scenarios until prompted to do so by the political sector.<br /><http: climate-change-four-degrees-of-devastation="" www.ipsnews.net=""><https: jul="" monarchy-credit-crunch="" uk="" www.theguardian.com="">Climate policymaking at all levels of government use the reports of the IPCC as the primary physical science basis. The failure of the IPCC to report in a balanced manner the full range of risks and to fully account for high-end outcomes leaves policymakers ill-informed and undermines the capacity of governments and communities to make the correct decisions to protect their well-being, or indeed to protect human civilisation as a whole, in the face of existential risks.<br /><br />A reframing of the scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required, if policymaking is to be soundly based.</https:></http:></http:></http:></http:></https:><br /><br /><blockquote><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au=""><http: climate-change-four-degrees-of-devastation="" www.ipsnews.net=""><https: jul="" monarchy-credit-crunch="" uk="" www.theguardian.com="">DOWNLOAD</https:></http:></http:></http:></http:></https:><br /><https: publications="" techrpt83_global_and_regional_slr_scenarios_for_the_="" tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov="" us_final.pdf=""><http: application="" convention="" english_paris_agreement.pdf="" essential_background="" files="" pdf="" unfccc.int=""><http: convention="" essential_background="" items="" php="" unfccc.int=""><http: br="" climate-change="" environment="" warming-limit-of-12-degrees-needed-to-save-great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-2017="" www.theage.com.au=""><http: climate-change-four-degrees-of-devastation="" www.ipsnews.net=""><https: jul="" monarchy-credit-crunch="" uk="" www.theguardian.com=""><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath" target="_blank"><i><b>What Lies Beneath: The scientific understatement of climate risks</b></i></a></https:></http:></http:></http:></http:></https:></blockquote>http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/10/policymakers-need-to-look-at-real.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-1859177408737238770Sat, 09 Sep 2017 00:49:00 +00002017-09-09T10:49:13.942+10:00national securitySyriaThe climate factor in Syrian instabilityby <b>Caitlin Werrell</b> and <b>Francesco Femia</b>, first <a href="https://climateandsecurity.org/2017/09/08/the-climate-factor-in-syrian-instability-a-conversation-worth-continuing/#more-14557" target="_blank">posted</a> at the Center for Climate and Security <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oDSM2N9xblg/WbM55SkIzxI/AAAAAAAAB80/ZTN_hu20Hdw0P5TmyxUfqIlq_MALEcXbwCLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-09-09%2Bat%2B10.45.37%2BAM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="601" height="218" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oDSM2N9xblg/WbM55SkIzxI/AAAAAAAAB80/ZTN_hu20Hdw0P5TmyxUfqIlq_MALEcXbwCLcBGAs/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-09-09%2Bat%2B10.45.37%2BAM.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Observed change in cold season precipitation <br />for the period 1971–2010 minus 1902–70 <br />(Hoerling et al., 2012).</td></tr></tbody></table>A recently-released <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816301822">study</a> by Jan Selby and colleagues analyzes existing research on the intersection of climate change and conflict in Syria. The article, published in the <i>Journal of Political Geography</i>, includes a critique of a <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582525">2015 study</a> published by the Center for Climate and Security’s (CCS) Caitlin Werrell, Francesco Femia and Troy Sternberg (and a short briefer by CCS from <a href="https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/syria-climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest_briefer-11.pdf">2012</a>), as well as two other studies by Colin Kelly et al (<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241">2015</a>) and Peter Gleick (<a href="http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0962-6298%2817%2930184-1/sref5">2014</a>). More research into the climate-conflict nexus in pre-civil war Syria is certainly welcome for better understanding the risks and informing future policies for addressing them. In this study, Selby et al. point to some important gaps in the data on the connection between displaced peoples and social and political unrest, and the possible role of market liberalization in the Syrian conflict. However, the study does nothing to refute the role of climate change in Syrian instability in the years before the war, while muddying the waters on the subject through a few mischaracterizations that are worth addressing at some length.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />&nbsp;On the surface, this may seem to be low-stakes ivory tower drama. However, the significance of robust research on the connections between climate and security should not be understated. As we’ve <a href="https://anglejournal.com/article/2015-11-fragile-states-the-nexus-of-climate-change-state-fragility-and-migration/">noted</a> previously, it is important not to oversimplify the links between climate change and conflict, as that can lead to bad policies and maladaptation. However, it is also important not to underestimate these links, as that can also lead to bad policy and a failure to adapt.<br /><br />In this context, there are three elements of the study that contribute to an underestimation of climate-related risks to Syria and the broader region: a mischaracterization of the climate science, a conflation of causality and contribution, and an underestimation of the human toll.<br /><br /><b>Mischaracterization of the Climate Science</b><br /><br /><b>First,</b> the study does not adequately substantiate its assertion that there is “no evidence of a long term drying trend” in the Fertile Crescent over the past 10-25 years, or its assertion that this drying is due to natural variability. Both claims run contrary to clear evidence in the scientific literature. Regarding the former claim, Colin Kelley (full disclosure, he is a <a href="https://climateandsecurity.org/colin-kelley/">Senior Research Fellow</a> with CCS) and his colleagues noted in their <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629817301841">commentary</a> on the article published in the same issue of the <i>Journal of</i> <i>Political Geography</i>:<br /><blockquote>“…an analysis of a new gridded tree ring dataset of winter/ spring surface moisture availability for all of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East (Cook et al. Science Advances, 2015) concluded that 1998-2012 was the driest 15-year period in the Levant in the last 900 years (Cook, Anchukaitis, Touchan, Meko. Journal of Geophysical Research, 2016). This new evidence confirms that recent drying is outside the range of what would be expected due to natural variability. “</blockquote>Further, Selby and his colleagues conclude that this exceptionally dry 10-25 year period was due to “natural decadal to multidecadal variability,” but again cite no evidence to substantiate the claim. Indeed, as Colin Kelley and his colleagues note, there is a compelling body of literature supporting the case that this drying trend is very likely due to a changing climate. This includes <a href="http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0962-6298%2817%2930184-1/sref8">Kelley et al. 2015</a>, <a href="http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0962-6298%2817%2930184-1/sref13">Zappa et al. 2015</a>, <a href="http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0962-6298%2817%2930184-1/sref13">Hoerling et al. 2012</a> and <a href="http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0962-6298%2817%2930184-1/sref9">Kelly et al. 2012</a>.<i>&nbsp;</i><br /><br /><i>Why This Matters:</i> How specifically climate change relates to other socio-economic-political factors is difficult to disentangle, as Selby et al. and previous researchers have correctly acknowledged. However, artificially downplaying the climate change factor in the region, in the face of significant scientific evidence to the contrary, does a disservice. This approach can serve to encourage political leaders to accept a rosier picture of the MENA region’s climate future, and thus contribute to inadequate preparation. Further, given that water stress has historically often served as a foundation for cooperation between conflicting parties, minimizing the contributions of climate change to water security could close potential avenues of conflict resolution and peacebuilding.<br /><br /><b>Conflation of Causality and Contribution</b><br /><br /><b>Second,</b> the study seems heavily focused on building up and batting down the strawman that climate change caused, or was a primary cause of, the conflict in Syria, which no serious researchers – including those who conducted the three main studies critiqued in the article – have claimed. The research to date is clear that climate change, which according to Kelley et al made the extreme drought in Syria <a href="http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0962-6298%2817%2930184-1/sref8">2-3 times more likely</a>, “contributed to” social unrest in Syria prior to the civil war by multiplying risks to agricultural lands and rangelands, particularly but not exclusively in the northeast. In this context, the drought was one of a number of other environmental, economic and governance factors – including natural resource mismanagement by the Assad regime – contributing to the mass displacement of a significant number of Syrians, and thus potentially increasing the “likelihood” of conflict – a probabilistic, not a causal, claim. This is the claim made in every article published by CCS experts on the subject (<a href="https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/syria-climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest_briefer-11.pdf">2012</a>, <a href="https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/climatechangearabspring-ccs-cap-stimson.pdf">2013</a>, <a href="https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/femia_sternberg_werrell_seton-hall-journal-of-diplomacy.pdf">2014</a> and <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582525">2015</a>), none of which assert that climate change “caused” the conflict in Syria, or even was a “primary cause” of that conflict.<i>&nbsp;</i><br /><br /><i>Why This Matters:</i> This is a very important clarification to make, particularly in terms of avoiding the narrative that government actors, such as the Assad regime at the time, are blameless in the face of natural forces. Poor governance on a number of levels – including unsustainable agricultural and pastoral practices – are significant contributing factors in the displacement that occurred during the period of the drought. Climate change, and the extreme drought, simply made the underlying environmental conditions in a poorly-governed state worse, thus increasing the likelihood of social unrest.&nbsp; In this context, the research to date has mostly avoided the language of causality in favor of the language of probability. As Cullen Hendrix wisely <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629817301531">notes</a> in his published commentary on the article (full disclosure again, Cullen is a <a href="https://climateandsecurity.org/cullen-hendrix/">Senior Research Advisor</a> with CCS):<br /><blockquote>“…scholars must avoid the siren’s song of using causal language as applied to particular cases when the evidence supports more probabilistic relationships. Both the public and the policy community are keen to link abstract, probabilistic mechanisms to particular cases, and thus scholars face implicit encouragement to frame their results in terms of cases that seem to fit the causal processes they seek to model. However, most work in this area finds climate shocks raise the probability of a large-scale event (like conflict onset) occurring relative to some baseline or increases the frequency with which smaller-scale events (protests, individual battles or skirmishes, cattle raids) occur. When this evidence is marshalled to explain any particular event, however, it often takes on the air of a necessary condition – if but for the climate shock, the event would not have occurred. This claim is almost always impossible to substantiate and invites significant criticism – to wit, the exchange here. Doing so undermines an already strong case for considering climate change a human and national security issue.”</blockquote>Scholars studying the linkages between climate change and conflict in Syria have largely followed Cullen’s advice, which is why it seems that Selby et al. primarily have an issue with the discourse in the media, rather than the discourse behind the academic journal paywall. Certainly, there is no shortage of headlines that have oversimplified the links between Syria, climate change and conflict. And yes, these oversimplifications can trickle up to the highest levels of government. We share the frustrations of Selby et al. about this dynamic. However, it is important to not conflate how research is characterized by the media, with what the research actually concludes. Research, and the public dissemination of that research, are two very different phenomena. Ideally, the way research is characterized by the media is accurate, but the audience for academic journals is not the same as the broader public. The role of the media is to take complex research and communicate it to a non-expert community accurately but clearly. This is a perennial challenge that will likely never be fully resolved. That said, responsibility for how an issue is covered is a shared one, and both researchers and journalists should aim to avoid oversimplification.<br /><br /><b>Underestimation of the Human Toll</b><br /><br /><b>Third,</b> the study underplays the scale of livelihood decimation and internal displacement in Syria during the period of the extreme drought, selectively choosing data from a shorter time period that excludes the later stages of the extreme drought, and selectively dismissing some journalistic, government and UN sources that are important for filling out a generally hazy picture. This is a worrying assertion, as it suggests a more stable picture in Assad’s pre-conflict Syria than may have actually existed. As Colin Kelley and colleagues note in their commentary:<br /><blockquote>“…in 2010 the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that about 300,000 families were driven to Damascus, Aleppo, and other cities in one of the “largest internal displacements in the Middle East in recent years” due to drought (Ababsa, 2015). During a mission to Syria that ended in September 2010, Olivier de Schutter, UN special reporter, stated that 1.3 million people had been affected by the four-year drought, 800,000 of whom had their livelihoods devastated. Not included in these estimates is the considerable displacement that occurred in the 6-18 months directly preceding the uprising, the time when we would expect that most of the displacement occurred given the accrued stress associated with the drought’s persistence. The authors of S2017 [Selby et al] provide little evidence that “excess migration” due to the drought was only a small proportion of the total displaced. Also cited by Ababsa was a 2010 report (IRIN, 2010) by IRIN, an independent, non-profit media service specializing in ground reporting on humanitarian crises. This report, titled “Syria drought pushing millions into poverty,” stated: “A top UN official warns that Syria’s drought is affecting food security and has pushed 2 to 3 million people into ‘extreme poverty’.”</blockquote><i>Why This Matters:</i> We of course cannot expect perfectly accurate numbers on internal displacement during the extreme drought period of 2007-2010, as the Assad regime made it difficult for journalists, researchers and humanitarian assistance workers to access those displaced peoples. Further, this period of drought was immediately followed by a violent civil war, thus making analysis of the primary reasons for the pre-war displacement, and a survey of how many of those displaced by the drought contributed to social and political unrest, very difficult to conduct. However, that does not imply that researchers should only accept official Syrian government and UN estimates of displaced peoples from one governorate during one year of a three-year extreme drought (2008-2009) to arrive at an estimate, as Selby et al. have done, and dismiss reports of mass displacement from the tail end of the extreme drought period (2009-2010). Journalistic sources, government sources, UN sources and even policy institute sources are all important in trying to cobble together a picture of vulnerability in an otherwise difficult-to-penetrate political environment. Collectively, these sources support estimates of around 1.5-2 million people having been displaced during the broader drought period of 2006-2011.<br /><br /><b>Let’s Focus on Probabilities and Prepare</b><br /><br />In conclusion, Selby and his colleagues expand the discourse on climate change and conflict simply by further exploring the issue, and by pointing to key gaps in the research related to the motivations of displaced peoples for contributing to political unrest, and the relative role of market liberalization during the period of inquiry. However, dismissing much of the scientific evidence, conflating causal claims with probabilistic claims, and downplaying the scale of livelihood decimation and human displacement by narrowing the scope of analysis to one year, can damage the truth of the drought’s impact. This also, albeit unintentionally, risks sending signals to policy-makers in the region (and internationally) that the risks are more easily managed than they are, and will likely be in the future.<br /><br />We share the study’s aim of better understanding the dynamics associated with climate change, political unrest, state fragility and conflict, and probing the blank spots in the data. On matters of peace and security, however, it is important that we not wait for ironclad causal links in the literature before advancing policies to anticipate, prevent and respond to risks that are probable. Climate change, by placing strains on basic natural resources, is very likely to exacerbate dynamics that can increase the vulnerability of populations, and the fragility of states. Those dynamics can increase the probability of conflict and instability, but do not guarantee it. Focusing on this broader picture, and emphasizing a probabilistic rather than causal paradigm for assessing these links, will lead to more fruitful – and useful – areas of future research.http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/09/the-climate-factor-in-syrian-instability.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-1994575683149086306Thu, 07 Sep 2017 07:36:00 +00002017-09-07T17:38:57.599+10:00scientific reticenceWhat lies beneath? The scientific understatement of climate risksBy <b>David Spratt</b> and <b>Ian Dunlop</b><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">This blog is the Introduction to <a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath" target="_blank"><i><b>What Lies Beneath: The scientific understatement of climate risks</b></i></a>, published today by Breakthrough, the National Centre for Climate Restoration.</blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wPj9tgxtJT8/WbD3PJW1IbI/AAAAAAAAB8Y/LVhvcKXKXUENKKmlFzpJSzI9ygu8xPRjgCLcBGAs/s1600/f6928bba-f862-47d1-82e6-504653db913c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="629" data-original-width="546" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wPj9tgxtJT8/WbD3PJW1IbI/AAAAAAAAB8Y/LVhvcKXKXUENKKmlFzpJSzI9ygu8xPRjgCLcBGAs/s320/f6928bba-f862-47d1-82e6-504653db913c.jpg" width="276" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath" target="_blank">Download report</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Three decades ago, when serious debate on human-induced climate change began at the global level, a great deal of statesmanship was on display. There was a preparedness to recognise that this was an issue transcending nation states, ideologies and political parties which had to be addressed proactively in the long-term interests of humanity as a whole, even if the existential nature of the risk it posed was far less clear cut than it is today.&nbsp; <br /><br />As global institutions were established to take up this challenge, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and the extent of change this would demand of the fossil-fuel-dominated world order became clearer, the forces of resistance began to mobilise. Today, as a consequence, and despite the diplomatic triumph of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the debate around climate change policy has never been more dysfunctional, indeed Orwellian.<br /><a name='more'></a>In his book <i>1984</i>, George Orwell describes a double-speak totalitarian state where most of the population accepts “the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.”<br /><br />Orwell could have been writing about climate change and policymaking. International agreements talk of limiting global warming to 1.5–2°C, but in reality they set the world on a path of 3–5°C. Goals are reaffirmed, only to be abandoned. Coal is “clean”. Just 1°C of warming is already dangerous, but this cannot be said. The planetary future is hostage to myopic national self-interest. Action is delayed on the assumption that as yet unproven technologies will save the day, decades hence. The risks are existential, but it is “alarmist” to say so. A one-in-two chance of missing a goal is normalised as reasonable.<br /><br />Climate policymaking for years has been cognitively dissonant, “a flagrant violation of reality”. So it is unsurprising that there is a lack of a understanding amongst the public and elites of the full measure of the climate challenge. Yet most Australians sense where we are heading: three-quarters of Australians <a href="http://www.comresglobal.com/polls/global-challenges-foundation-global-risks-survey" target="_blank">see climate change as catastrophic risk</a>, and half <a href="http://www.richardeckersley.com.au/attachments/Futures_future_threats__FINAL.pdf" target="_blank">see our way of life ending within the next 100 years</a>.<br /><br />Politics and policymaking have norms: rules and practices, assumptions and boundaries, that constrain and shape them. In recent years, the previous norms of statesmanship and long-term thinking have disappeared, replaced by an obsession with short-term political and commercial advantage&nbsp;&nbsp; Climate policymaking is no exception.<br /><br />Since 1992, short-term economic interest has trumped environmental and future human needs. The world today emits 48% more carbon dioxide (CO2) from the consumption of energy than it did 25 years ago, and the global economy has more than doubled in size. The UNFCCC strives "to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner”, but every year humanity’s ecological footprint becomes larger and less sustainable. Humanity now requires the biophysical capacity of 1.7 planets annually to survive as it rapidly chews up the natural capital.<br /><br />A fast, emergency-scale transition to a post-fossil fuel world is absolutely necessary to address climate change. But this is excluded from consideration by policymakers because it is considered to be too disruptive. The orthodoxy is that there is time for an orderly economic transition within the current short-termist political paradigm. Discussion of what would be safe –– less warming that we presently experience –– is non-existent. And so we have a policy failure of epic proportions.<br /><br />Policymakers, in their magical thinking, imagine a mitigation path of gradual change, to be constructed over many decades in a growing, prosperous world. The world not imagined is the one that now exists: of looming financial instability; of a global crisis of political legitimacy; of a sustainability crisis that extends far beyond climate change to include all the fundamentals of human existence and most significant planetary boundaries (soils, potable water, oceans, the atmosphere, biodiversity, and so on); and of severe global energy sector dislocation.<br /><br />In anticipation of the upheaval that climate change would impose upon the global order, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was established by the UN in 1988, charged with regularly assessing the global consensus on climate science as a basis for policymaking.&nbsp; The IPCC <i>Assessment Reports </i>(<i>AR</i>), produced every 5–6 years, play a large part in the public framing of the climate narrative: new reports are a global media event.&nbsp; <i>AR5</i> was produced in 2013-14, with <i>AR6</i> due in 2022. The IPCC has done critical, indispensable work of the highest standard in pulling together a periodic consensus of what must be the most exhaustive scientific investigation in world history.&nbsp; It does not carry out its own research, but reviews and collates peer-reviewed material from across the spectrum of this incredibly complex area, identifying key issues and trends for policymaker consideration.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tLFEtL2uXOI/Wa8o3D12R8I/AAAAAAAAB7U/9RuhvVBhUBkKDWFNcDthwZgzI5FLtDNagCLcBGAs/s1600/SLR_models_obs.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="317" data-original-width="450" height="281" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tLFEtL2uXOI/Wa8o3D12R8I/AAAAAAAAB7U/9RuhvVBhUBkKDWFNcDthwZgzI5FLtDNagCLcBGAs/s400/SLR_models_obs.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Observed sea-level rise 1970-2010 from tide gauge data (red) and satellite measurements (blue) compared to model projections for 1990-2010 from the IPCC Third Assessment Report (grey band). (Source: The Copenhagen Diagnosis , 2009)</td></tr></tbody></table>However, the IPCC process suffers from all the dangers of consensus-building in such a wide-ranging and complex arena.&nbsp; For example, IPCC reports, of necessity, do not always contain the latest available information.&nbsp; Consensus-building can lead to “least drama”, lowest-common-denominator outcomes which overlook critical issues. This is particularly the case with the “fat-tails” of probability distributions, that is, the high-impact but relatively low-probability events where scientific knowledge is more limited.&nbsp; Vested interest pressure is acute in all directions; climate denialists accuse the IPCC of alarmism, whereas climate action proponents consider the IPCC to be far too conservative. To cap it all, the IPCC conclusions are subject to intense political oversight before being released, which historically has had the effect of substantially watering-down sound scientific findings.&nbsp; <br /><br />These limitations are understandable, and arguably were not of overriding importance in the early period of the IPCC.&nbsp; However, as time has progressed, it is now clear that the risks posed by climate change are far greater than previously anticipated.&nbsp; We have moved out of the twilight period of much talk but relatively limited climate impacts. Climate change is now turning nasty, as we have witnessed in 2017 in the USA, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe, with record-breaking heatwaves and wildfires, more intense flooding and more damaging hurricanes.<br /><br />The distinction between climate science and risk is now the critical issue, for the two are not the same.&nbsp; Scientific reticence — a reluctance to spell out the full risk implications of climate science in the absence of perfect information — has become a major problem. Whilst this is understandable, particularly when scientists are continually criticised by denialists and political apparatchiks for speaking out, it is extremely dangerous given the “fat tail” risks of climate change.&nbsp; Waiting for perfect information, as we are continually urged to do by political and economic elites, means it will be too late to act.<br /><br />Irreversible, adverse climate change on the global scale now occurring is <a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley" target="_blank">an existential risk to human civilisation</a>.&nbsp; Many of the world’s top climate scientists quoted in this report well understand these implications — James Hansen, Michael E. Mann, John Schellnhuber, Kevin Anderson, Eric Rignot, Naomi Oreskes, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Oppenheimer, Stefan Rahmstorf and others — and are forthright about their findings, where we are heading, and the limitations of IPCC reports.<br /><br />This report seeks to alert the wider community and leaders to these limitations and urges change to the IPCC approach, and to the wider UNFCCC negotiations.&nbsp; It is clear that existing processes will not deliver the transformation to a low-carbon world in the limited time now available.&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />We urgently require a reframing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework.&nbsp; This requires special precautions that go well beyond conventional risk management. Like an iceberg, there is great danger “In what lies beneath”.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">DOWNLOAD<br /><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/whatliesbeneath" target="_blank"><i><b>What Lies Beneath: The scientific understatement of climate risks</b></i></a> </blockquote>http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/09/what-lies-beneath-scientific.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-7399684294289614196Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:48:00 +00002017-08-31T10:50:18.749+10:00extreme weatherHurricane Harvey: Connecting the dots between climate change and more extreme eventsby <b>Climate Nexus</b><br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nudmAWrFrpU/WadYPXoBxXI/AAAAAAAAB6g/hwk8pyF8dYgrK68S6ZrwBAZ79k90BU_JQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/170825-hurricane-harvey-worse-sandy-alt-embed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nudmAWrFrpU/WadYPXoBxXI/AAAAAAAAB6g/hwk8pyF8dYgrK68S6ZrwBAZ79k90BU_JQCK4BGAYYCw/s320/170825-hurricane-harvey-worse-sandy-alt-embed.jpg" width="320" /></a>The science of attributing extreme weather to climate change is complicated and developing every day. Here’s a guide of what we know about the links between climate change and Harvey to help unpack the elements that contributed to this historic and unfolding storm. For a complete annotated backgrounder, visit the <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/headlines/events/tropical-storm-harvey-2017" target="_blank">related events page</a> on <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/" target="_blank">Climate Signals</a>.<br /><br /><b>Warmth</b><br /><br />As seas warm, more water evaporates to the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water, fueling extreme rainfall and increasing flood risk. Record-breaking rainfall is a classic signature of climate change, and the fingerprint of climate change has been firmly identified in the observed global trend of increasing extreme precipitation.<br /><a name='more'></a><br /><ul><li>Many areas of Southeast Texas have received rain so extreme that historical data indicates it should only happen <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/29/harvey-marks-the-most-extreme-rain-event-in-u-s-history/?utm_term=.20aaf4380971" target="_blank">once every 1,000 years</a>.</li><li>&nbsp;Houston is experiencing its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houston-is-experiencing-its-third-500-year-flood-in-3-years-how-is-that-possible/?utm_term=.6c920db44145" target="_blank">third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>&nbsp;Since the 1950s, Houston has seen a <a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/across-us-heaviest-downpours-on-the-rise-18989" target="_blank">167 percent increase</a> in the frequency of the most intense downpours.&nbsp;</li><li>&nbsp;A rain gauge in Mont Belvieu, about 40 miles east of Houston, registered <a href="https://twitter.com/NWSHouston/status/902639163882831874" target="_blank">51.88 inches</a> of rain through late afternoon Tuesday. Once verified, this amount would break not only the Texas state rainfall record but also <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/29/harvey-marks-the-most-extreme-rain-event-in-u-s-history/?utm_term=.969ad1d551c2" target="_blank">the record for the remaining Lower 48 state</a>s.</li><li>&nbsp;A formal <a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/louisiana-floods-directly-linked-to-climate-change-20671" target="_blank">attribution study</a> of last year’s historic flood in Louisiana found that climate change to date had most likely doubled the frequency of the extreme rainfall that drove that flood.</li><li>Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, “The human contribution can be <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/did-climate-change-intensify-hurricane-harvey/538158/" target="_blank">up to 30 percent</a> or so of the total rainfall coming out of the storm.”</li></ul><b>Stalled weather</b><br /><br />Another major contributor to the extreme rainfall totals was that Harvey stalled for many days over southeast Texas. Waves in the jet stream can stall in place (instead of moving eastward), leading to blocking and persistent weather patterns that fuel the intensity and duration of rainfall events.<br /><ul><li>A s<a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/5973" target="_blank">tudy from March 2017</a> found that climate change is altering large scale weather patterns, such as the jet stream, which have the ability to dramatically amplify extreme weather events, such as extreme rainfall, during the summer.</li><li><a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/7212" target="_blank">According to Michael Mann</a>, the stalled weather pattern during Hurricane Harvey “is precisely the sort of pattern we expect because of climate change.”</li></ul><b>Sea level rise</b><br /><br />Sea level rise has significantly <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/3842" target="_blank">extended the reach</a> of storm surge and coastal flooding driven by hurricanes.<br /><ul><li>&nbsp;While Harvey’s storm surge was not nearly as extreme as the observed rainfall, the two <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/headlines/hurricane-harvey-why-it-so-extreme" target="_blank">combined to create what is known as “compound flooding</a>". Rivers rushing toward the Gulf coast met the storm surge coming inland and water “<a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/headlines/hurricane-harvey-why-it-so-extreme" target="_blank">piled up from both sides</a>”. In Galveston, the sea surge was about 3 feet but the <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/headlines/hurricane-harvey-why-it-so-extreme" target="_blank">actual water surge was about 9 feet</a> due to compound flooding.</li><li>&nbsp;A <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/headlines/here%E2%80%99s-what-know-about-harvey%E2%80%99s-storm-surge-and-widespread-flood-threat" target="_blank">storm tide level of 7.0 feet</a> above Mean Sea Level (MSL) was observed at Port Lavaca, Texas, during the storm—the highest storm surge in that location since Hurricane Carla in 1961.</li></ul><b>Energy</b><br /><br />The warmer the waters, the more energy available to passing storms, increasing the risk of major hurricane development. Climate change also affects other factors that shape and control hurricane development, such as wind shear. The balance of all these factors is not fully known. However, hurricanes have grown stronger over recent decades. And there is a significant risk global warming may be driving that trend.<br /><ul><li>&nbsp;Harvey rapidly intensified from a regenerated tropical depression into a Category 4 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, aided by sea surface temperatures up to <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/7158" target="_blank">2.7 - 7.2°F (1.5 - 4°C) above average</a>.</li><li>&nbsp;Last winter, the daily surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico <a href="https://twitter.com/MichaelRLowry/status/836614194401267712" target="_blank">never dropped below 73°F for the first time on record</a>.</li></ul><b>Rapid intensification</b><br /><br />There is an <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/2412" target="_blank">observable trend toward increasingly rapid intensification of hurricanes</a>, leaving less time to prepare. There is a significant risk that this trend is driven by global warming.<br /><ul><li>Harvey’s rapid intensification is <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/2412" target="_blank">consistent with the observed trend</a> toward rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones, particularly in the <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/4613" target="_blank">North Atlantic</a> and Caribbean.</li></ul><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-T8C1O0QqKNw/Wadco6juATI/AAAAAAAAB6s/ND5RcFufyjgsomqfDtoLRql6ydtxFL2jwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/8846306-3x2-700x467-1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-T8C1O0QqKNw/Wadco6juATI/AAAAAAAAB6s/ND5RcFufyjgsomqfDtoLRql6ydtxFL2jwCK4BGAYYCw/s400/8846306-3x2-700x467-1.jpg" width="400" /></a>&nbsp;</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>FAQ - Tropical Storm Harvey Climate Change Fingerprints</b></span><br /><br /><b>What about natural variability?</b><br />Climate change often magnifies the scope or frequency of a disaster, while natural variation is often the dominant determinant for an event’s occurrence and overall activity. However, the more extreme the event, the larger the likely contribution of climate change to the event. In this case, unusually warm waters and atmosphere supercharged the storm, contributing to the record-breaking rainfall.<br /><br /><b>What role does sea level rise play?</b><br />Sea level rise attributable to climate change is more than half a foot over the past few decades. That means that <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/posts/1515449771844553" target="_blank">the storm surge was a half foot higher than it would have been just decades ago</a>, resulting in far more flooding and destruction.<br /><br /><b>Does “uncertainty” mean scientists don’t have enough evidence to confidently point to the climate connection?</b><br />It’s important to keep in mind that any time scientists in any field collect data on any subject there is uncertainty. Uncertainty refers to the fact that you can never really measure anything exactly. The existence of uncertainty is by no means a disqualifier for scientists to speak with confidence as long as they address the range of uncertainty. There are degrees of uncertainty, but some things we can say for sure: seas are rising and amplifying storm surge, climate change fuels extreme rainfall and is increasing the potential energy available to passing storms.<br /><br /><b>Hasn’t there been a major US landfalling hurricane drought? And isn’t this an anomaly?</b><br />The argument that, before Harvey, it had been many years since the US experienced a major hurricane is sophisticated cherry picking. Each qualifier before the word drought—landfalling and US landfalling—makes faulty assumptions that obscure the overall picture of changes occurring in the Atlantic hurricane basin. <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/6458" target="_blank">A frequency analysis published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society</a> established that this data cherry picking is responsible for the illusion of a "drought" in landfalling hurricanes in the US. One needs to look at multiple decades to identify changes in the frequency of major landfalling hurricanes. Such data does show that there has been an increase in the Atlantic basin as a whole.<br /><br /><b>Is this a “taste of things to come?”</b><br />We are living with the reality of climate change, right here and right now. Since 1850, the planet has <a href="http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/" target="_blank">warmed significantly</a> and the toll <a href="https://climate.nasa.gov/images-of-change?id=621#621-monsoon-rain-inundates-sri-lanka" target="_blank">can be seen worldwide</a>. In the US, the impact of climate change in is now <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/28/climate-change-hurricane-harvey-more-deadly" target="_blank">clear</a>, <a href="https://hbr.org/2017/06/if-you-think-fighting-climate-change-will-be-expensive-calculate-the-cost-of-letting-it-happen" target="_blank">costly</a> and <a href="https://riskybusiness.org/report/national/" target="_blank">widespread</a>.<br /><br /><b>Why is it important to talk about climate change now?</b><br />In a warming world, talking about an extreme weather event without discussing how climate change exacerbates the destruction and the suffering does not provide a complete picture. Including the context of climate change enables decision-makers to prepare for future impacts and empowers citizens to hold their elected leaders accountable to addressing the root problem. The underlying reason for the uncertainty around talking about climate change is because the fossil fuel industry deliberately obscured this reality from the public for decades, and has a vested interest in limiting knowledge around the damage that their products cause. Muting discussion on climate change as a devastating storm unfolds is a political strategy that serves the interests of those who wish to delay meaningful action on climate change.http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-connecting-dots.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-6600654227718739698Wed, 16 Aug 2017 09:52:00 +00002017-08-16T19:52:30.285+10:00Chinese climate impacts will hit Australian economy<div class="postdate">By <b>David Spratt</b> and <b>Alia Armistead</b>, first published at <a href="http://reneweconomy.com.au/chinese-climate-impacts-will-hit-australian-economy-70655" target="_blank"><b>RenewEconomy</b></a>&nbsp; </div><div class="printfriendly pf-alignright"><a class="noslimstat" href="http://reneweconomy.com.au/chinese-climate-impacts-will-hit-australian-economy-70655/?utm_source=RE+Daily+Newsletter&amp;utm_campaign=c987300d35-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_15&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_46a1943223-c987300d35-40244865#" rel="nofollow"><img alt="Print Friendly" src="https://cdn.printfriendly.com/button-print-blu20.png" style="-webkit-box-shadow: none; border: none; box-shadow: none;" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5xcO-Org9B4/V6sISaXN-KI/AAAAAAAABrY/O64rYXyFIUUVZRQweF3hZ-hDKqBtbuXFQCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/shenzhen-flood-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="334" data-original-width="500" height="213" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5xcO-Org9B4/V6sISaXN-KI/AAAAAAAABrY/O64rYXyFIUUVZRQweF3hZ-hDKqBtbuXFQCPcBGAYYCw/s320/shenzhen-flood-01.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>How hard will climate-change impacts in China hit the Australian economy? It’s a question<br />rarely asked in Australia, but one the current Senate inquiry into the national security<br />implications of climate change needs to answer. Two vital questions for Australia are the extent to which climate change impacts in China could damage the Australian economy, and the regional strategic consequences should climate impacts in China undermine domestic political stability.<br /><br />Australia faces severe consequences if China’s economy grows at a significantly lower rate, or falls into recession. China is Australia’s largest trading partner and overseas market for Australian resources, services and agriculture, representing over a quarter of all Australian exports at $85.9 billion in 2015-2016.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />Two-way China–Australia trade is more than twice that of our next largest trading partner, Japan. The relationship with China represents Australia’s largest dependence on any one nation since the UK in the 1950s. In addition, while China ranks third for foreign investment in Australia, future increases in investment from China are central to the prosperity of many Australian industries, such as agriculture and construction.<br /><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/economics/slowdown-in-china-would-cost-500000-jobs-warns-deloitte/news-story/621470366b21a71691715c5e47dd65e9&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502944350788000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGklW6DWUE2p5wJp_mqVMeR47ecPA" href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/economics/slowdown-in-china-would-cost-500000-jobs-warns-deloitte/news-story/621470366b21a71691715c5e47dd65e9" target="_blank">Modelling</a> from Deloitte’s Access Economics, released by economist Chris Richardson, shows that a slowing of China’s growth rate from 6.5% to 3% would effectively cause a recession in Australia. There would be a loss of 500,000 jobs, a 9% drop in house prices costing Australian families $600 billion, and a 17% share market drop costing $300 billion. Construction and mining sectors would be hit the hardest, resulting in a housing market crash, and a drop in iron ore exports. Iron ore, the biggest component of Australian exports to China, is extremely sensitive to economic conditions.<br /><br />Victor Shvets of Macquarie Bank <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/the-business/2017-06-29/viktor-shvets-speaks-to-the-business/8665382&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502944350788000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEvHjz6cp2XjNYw83rJa-YnyBdGZw" href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/the-business/2017-06-29/viktor-shvets-speaks-to-the-business/8665382" target="_blank">describes</a> a Chinese economic downturn or “collapse” as inevitable due to the “misalignments” of resources and the affected return on investment and equity. While the timing of a Chinese downfall cannot be accurately estimated, Shvets says that any collapse would have severe ramifications due to &nbsp;China’s central role in the global economy.<br /><br />China currently controls 15 per cent of global trade, 30 per cent of global savings and more than 30 per cent of global investment. However, China is experiencing <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-22/the-trouble-with-china-and-what-it-means-for-australia/8545886&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502944350788000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHEs9Qg3Jez3SF1bCigZBhbRgwEzA" href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-22/the-trouble-with-china-and-what-it-means-for-australia/8545886" target="_blank">record debt levels</a>: its debt to GDP ratio stands at an eye-watering 277 per cent; there is a large and opaque “shadow banking” system; and “no nation has ever emerged from such a debt-fuelled growth binge in such a short space of time without a serious lift in bad debts, and a deep recession”, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-22/the-trouble-with-china-and-what-it-means-for-australia/8545886&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502944350788000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHEs9Qg3Jez3SF1bCigZBhbRgwEzA" href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-22/the-trouble-with-china-and-what-it-means-for-australia/8545886" target="_blank">says</a> business commentator Ian Verrender.<br /><br />There are growing <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.dni.gov/index.php/global-trends-home&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502944350788000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFnvTnXYjd9LzyhZ96iu0SdCpLMOA" href="https://www.dni.gov/index.php/global-trends-home" target="_blank">fragilities</a> in the China’s economy: it is changing focus from the export to the consumption sector, the working-age population is shrinking, state-owned enterprises, competition is increasing from lower-cost developing nations, and there is increasing pressure on wages for unskilled workers.<br /><br />A downturn in the Chinese economy could be triggered or heightened by climate change events. Increased natural disasters, growing water shortages impacting the agricultural sector, the threat of rising sea levels on low-lying cities and industries including agriculture, and damage to infrastructure from extreme events are just some of the potential impacts. Some key issues are:<br /><ul><li dir="ltr"><div><b>Infrastructure hotspots:</b> Research has <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/where-will-climate-change-impact-china-most/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502944350788000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGzaRC937aEYuQZTm17cT0SQX7LRw" href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/where-will-climate-change-impact-china-most/" target="_blank">identified</a> infrastructure hotspots in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Zheijiang and Jiangsu, that are most vulnerable to economic impacts from climate change. Critical hotspots include zones of concentrated critical infrastructure on which large numbers of people are dependent, and include transport systems, water treatment centres and power plants. Unprecedented incidents, including frequent power outages, intermittent water supply, transport cancellations, production losses, property damage and industrial accidents, are likely to impact both individuals and companies. The Thailand floods in 2011 are an example of the economic ramifications of climate change events: manufacturing plants, including Toyota and Honda, were closed for months, and the disaster represented 80% of the world’s total economic losses for the same year. A similar event in China would likely have even greater global consequences due to China’s manufacturing dominance in the global supply chain.</div></li><li dir="ltr"><div><b>Water insecurity:</b> China comprises 20% of the global population but has only 7% of available fresh water. Changing climate patterns, causing droughts and increased desertification, have reduced freshwater reserves by 13% between 2000 and 2009. Twenty-four thousand villages in north and west China have been abandoned due to desertification in the last 50 years: the advancing Gobi Desert is now only 150 miles from Beijing. Three hundred million rural people have no access to safe drinking water, and 54% of the main rivers contain water unfit for human consumption. A World Bank report on China’s water situation foresees catastrophic consequences for future generations unless water use and supply can quickly be brought back into balance. The government also fears that increased competition for water resources between large industries, to whom the majority of water allocations are given, cities and farmers poses a risk of creating social instability.</div></li><li dir="ltr"><div><b>Agriculture:</b> Four-fifths of China’s grain harvest comes from irrigated land, which uses surface water principally drawn from the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which are fed from the Tibetan Plateau. Irrigated areas are highly vulnerable to changes in water availability. The water table under the North China Plain is falling fast. This is an area that produces half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn. Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer and forced well-drillers to turn to the region’s unreplenishable deep aquifer.</div><div>Wheat yields dropped 4.5% over the period 1979-2000, a loss attributed to climate change. Projections show potential reduction in cereal output of up to 18% by 2040 compared 2000. Such consequences would mean that China will lose the ability to feed about 10% of its 1.3 billion people.</div><div>Major droughts in China and Russia in 2010 devastated local wheat production, driving up international prices and in some cases tripling the price of bread in Egypt and across the Maghreb in 2010-2011. This caused major food riots and became a driver of the Arab Spring. An increased likelihood of crop failure in China has the capacity to again disrupt international grain markets, and the stability of nations.</div></li><li dir="ltr"><div><b>Inundation of primary manufacturing zone:</b> China’s Pearl River Delta special industrial zone, which includes &nbsp;the cities of Guangdong and Shenzhen, is responsible for 20% of national GDP, more than 30% of foreign direct investment, and 40% of China’s exports. In 2012, Guangdong handled more than 1.2 billion tonnes of freight. However, this area is less than two metres above sea level, and built on a sinking delta, and is very vulnerable to both rising sea levels and storm surges caused by cyclones. The region is home to the greatest number of people (after Kolkata) estimated to be at risk of flooding anywhere in the world.</div><div>A 2013 study researched coastal defenses and their level of protection, and found that, in terms of the overall cost of damage from inundation and rising sea levels, Guangzhou was the city at the greatest risk while Shenzhen was ninth most vulnerable. “Hard” defences are not considered to be feasible , however, the question of the Pearl River Delta’s vulnerability to cyclone-driven storm surges and rising sea levels is pertinent. Waters in the South China Sea and Philippines are considered to be “Cyclone Alley” highlighted by Cyclone Haiyan, which hit the Philippines in 2013, and was the strongest cyclone on record to make landfall anywhere in the world.</div><div>In understanding the vulnerability of the Pearl River Delta, it is important to recognise that climate change has already likely triggered the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), with loss of a significant fraction of WAIS on a decadal to century time-scale, and Antarctica alone could contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100. The US Department of Defence is now using sea-level rise scenarios of 1 and 2 metres by 2100 and a US government agency has just lifted its maximum sea-level rise estimate to 2.5 metres by 2100.</div></li><li dir="ltr"><div><b>Internal migration:</b> Changes to regional precipitation patterns, resource scarcity and agricultural productivity have been identified as drivers of internal migration in China and are likely to accelerate in the future. Internal migration most commonly occurs from rural to urban areas where people are often forced into urban slums, creating social issues and conflict between internal migrants and those already settled. This contributes to the danger that government will be unable to cope with rapidly swelling urban populations and large amounts of displaced people, particularly in the event of natural disasters or delta and coastal inundation.</div></li></ul>China’s vulnerability to such climate impacts should be of urgent concern to the Australian Government. Imagine the following scenario:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In China’s north, a water crisis deepens with overexploitation of groundwater, reduced irrigation capacity, and a two-year northern monsoon failure. A political crisis develops in rural communities, strengthened in the north-west by long-standing grievances among the Muslim minority, and there is significant internal migration to the large cities. A category 5 typhoon hits the Pearl River Delta/Guangdong free-trade zone, and storm surges inundate half of the delta, destroying infrastructure and significantly disabling export capacity for up to a year.<br />Consequently, the Chinese economy stalls and tips into recession, while chronic and opaque debt, especially in the state sector, cascades into a full-blown credit crisis. The crash infects Asian markets, and Australian banks are exposed. As Chinese output stagnates, Australian resource exports fall, putting further pressure on a fragile Australian domestic stock market.<br />Chinese employers try to replace organised labour with new migrants from the countryside, but workers resist, especially in unionised overseas firms in the Guangdong zone, and labour disputes escalate. The middle class joins the revolt as they lose out from over-leveraged stocks in a plunging share market. An internal political crisis gathers strength, and other parties decide to test Chinese sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.</blockquote>The economic and strategic implications for Australia would be profound, but it is difficult to find evidence that the Australian Government has assessed the consequences in any systematic way.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><div>The authors are researchers for <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502944350789000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGopw7waCMn3N_ZMpNk3es_3WyLzQ" href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley" target="_blank">Breakthrough – the National Centre for Climate Restoration</a></div></blockquote>http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/08/chinese-climate-impacts-will-hit.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-5100878528286663960Thu, 27 Jul 2017 06:31:00 +00002017-07-28T11:05:15.479+10:00climate policy paradigmJames Hansensafe climateParis 1.5-2°C target far from safe, say world-leading scientistsby <b>David Spratt</b>, first published at <a href="http://reneweconomy.com.au/paris-1-5-2c-target-far-from-safe-say-world-leading-scientists-81532/" target="_blank"><i>Renew Economy</i></a><br /><br />The Paris climate agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (ºC) is well above temperatures experienced during the Holocene — period of human settlement over the last 11,700 years — and is far from safe because “if such temperature levels are allowed to long exist they will spur “slow” amplifying feedbacks… which have potential to run out of humanity’s control.”<br /><br />That’s the message from some of the world best climate scientists, including former NASA climate chief, James Hansen, in a newly paper, “Young people’s burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions”, published in Earth System Dynamics this month.<br /><br /><a href="http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BT_WhySafeTargetsMatter-copy.jpg"><img alt="BT_WhySafeTargetsMatter copy" class="aligncenter wp-image-97578" src="http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BT_WhySafeTargetsMatter-copy-590x399.jpg" height="270" width="400" /></a><br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Co-authors include cryosphere expert Eric Rignot, paleo-climatologist Shaun Marcott, and oceanographer Eelco Rohling. They conclude that “the world has overshot the appropriate target for global temperature” because there are big risks in “pushing the climate system far out of its Holocene range”.<br /><br />The researchers say the current temperature of 1ºC warming (compared to the 1880-1920 baseline) is about half a degree warmer that the Holocene maximum, and about as hot as it got in a previous warm period, the Eemian (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) when the “sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) higher than today”.<br /><br />This glimpse into past climates shows that the current level of climate warming, with temperatures similar to the Eemian maximum, are dangerous. This is because “long-term” feedbacks would result in significant loss of polar ice sheets, raise the sea level by several metres, and may activate the permafrost layer in a nasty carbon-cycle feedback.<br /><br />Such a feedback — in which climate warming triggers the release of stored carbon in polar regions, pushes more carbon into the atmosphere, and raises the temperature further — produces an escalating cycle of warming that may be beyond the human capacity to reign warming in.<br /><br />In their&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/8/577/2017&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1501205489040000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE7beT-cfWG8mnLQFhp11l6Q8ki6w" href="https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/8/577/2017" target="_blank">research paper</a>&nbsp;and an associated&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://phys.org/news/2017-07-co2-air-required-safeguard-children.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1501205489040000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHrOb4m4f5Ezy53Ybwx0vx2wX0elw" href="https://phys.org/news/2017-07-co2-air-required-safeguard-children.html" target="_blank">media release</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/2017/07/18/young-peoples-burden-requirement-of-negative-co2-emissions/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1501205489040000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEUxhPn2xCZRvAxiGHAEX3pi6LKkA" href="http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/2017/07/18/young-peoples-burden-requirement-of-negative-co2-emissions/" target="_blank">brief</a>, the authors lay out the evidence and need for drastic, immediate emission reductions, and the drawdown of atmospheric carbon to a safe level. Here are the main findings of the research (all figures are based on a 1880-1920 baseline).<br /><div><div><br /><b>Temperature:</b> The observed warming trend shows we are now 1.05ºC above the 1880-1920 baseline. In addition, there was about 0.1ºC between the mid-18th century and the late-19th century.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thus the total warming to date from “pre-industrial” conditions is about 1.15C. (This is similar to the newly-published&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3345.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1501205489040000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEpnh570iNTPKd8G9S9UX1FyMpyTQ" href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3345.html" target="_blank">“Importance of the pre-industrial baseline for likelihood of exceeding Paris goals”</a>&nbsp;which says warming since “pre-industrial” has been around 1.2ºC.)<br /><br /><b>Holocene: </b>During the Holocene, the period of human settlement starting 11,700 years ago, the temperature varied in a narrow band of 0.6ºC, with the early Holocene warmer than the more recent period.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The modern trend line of global temperature “crossed the early Holocene temperature maximum in about 1985”, and “the temperature trend today is now 0.5ºC above the Holocene maximum”.</div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So humans have created and are now experiencing a warmer climate than at any time during the period of human civilisation (fixed settlement).<br /><br /><b>Eemian:</b> The most recent warm-period analogous to today was the Eemian, 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Today, global warming “has raised global temperature… to the level of the Eemian period”, so Eemian conditions give us an insight into what the current level of warming, of just over 1ºC, is likely to produce.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The picture is not pretty: during the Eemian, “sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) higher than today”. Whilst “sea-level rise this century of say half a metre to a metre, which may be inevitable even if emissions decline, would have dire consequences… these are dwarfed by the humanitarian and economic disasters that would accompany sea-level rise of several metres”.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The reason is simple: human civilisation has been predominantly built around the coasts, and the world substantially relies on the rich alluvial deltas such as the Nile, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Mekong for food. A one-metre sea-level rise would inundate 20% of land area of Bangladesh, wipe out 40% of the Mekong Delta, flood one-fourth of the Nile Delta and depopulate some coral atoll small states.<br /><br /><b>1.5ºC target:</b> If the current 1ºC of warming is likely to raise the sea-level by several, devastating, metres, then clearly 1.5ºC is not a suitable goal. On this the researchers are very clear.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The big problem is that the Paris 1.5 and 2ºC goals “are far above the Holocene temperature range” and if “allowed to long exist they will spur “slow” amplifying feedbacks”.<br />The researchers say that: “The most threatening slow feedback likely is ice sheet melt and consequent significant sea level rise, as occurred in the Eemian, but there are other risks in pushing the climate system far out of its Holocene range. Methane release from thawing permafrost and methane hydrates is another potential feedback, for example, but the magnitude and timescale of this is unclear.”<br /><br /><img alt="global temp last 12000 years - david spratt chart" class="aligncenter wp-image-97551 size-large" src="http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/global-temp-last-12000-years-david-spratt-chart-590x443.jpg" height="300" width="400" /><br /><br /><b>Safe goal:</b> So what would be safe? The answer is that&nbsp; “limiting the period and magnitude of temperature excursion above the Holocene range is crucial to avoid strong stimulation of slow feedbacks”.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In other words, aim to get temperatures back under the Holocene maximum of 0.5ºC, which implies a level of greenhouse gases below 320 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), compared to the current level of 405 ppm.<br /><br /><b>Target 350 ppm:</b> Whilst acknowledging that “an appropriate goal is to return global temperature to the Holocene range within a century” or under 0.5ºC, in the first instance Hansen et al. propose getting down below 350 ppm, which should keep temperatures from staying above 1ºC.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But this may not be enough. In a&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/scientist-jim-hansen-the-planet-could-become-ungovernable.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1501205489040000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEGgwLqHBakR4IWADc11YvIDFv3-g" href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/scientist-jim-hansen-the-planet-could-become-ungovernable.html" target="_blank">recent interview</a>, Hansen acknowledges: “So what should humanity aim for? It’s not any larger than 350 ppm, and it might be less.”<br /><br /><b>Drawdown requirements:</b> The paper then explores at some length the actions required to get the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide back below 350 ppm.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The first conclusion is that this is only possible by actively drawing down carbon dioxide by reforestation, changed soils practices, or more technological methods; getting to zero emissions and relying on the carbon cycle by themselves will not get us there.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The second conclusion is that the drawdown task becomes more difficult the longer it takes to bend the emissions curve down.For example, “if we start reducing CO2 emissions in 2021 at a rate of 6% a year, we’d need to also extract about 150 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by 2100. Most of this, about 100 gigatonnes, could come from improved agricultural and forestry practices alone.”<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; However, if the emissions reduction rate after 2020 is only 3% a year, then the amount of drawdown required jumps to 230 gigatonnes of carbon and more of this would require expensive solutions: “continued high fossil fuel emissions would demand expensive technological solutions to extract CO2 and prevent dangerous warming.”<br /><br /><b>Changing goals:</b> We are also reminded that the goals of climate policy-making have shifted dramatically in three decades.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The 2°C “was more or less plucked out of thin air, in 1975, not by scientists, but by economist William Nordhaus as ‘a first intuition’ [and] subsequent analyses essentially defaulted to this figure in what amounts to the science being moulded to fit the political and economic paradigm, as climate scientist Kevin Anderson puts it, rather than to what the data actually tells us”, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/06/04/dropping-out-paris-even-worse-you-think-way-worse" target="_blank">writes </a>John Acheson. <br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Hansen et al. note that whilst in 1992 the goal was “stabilization of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, by 2009 the Copenhagen climate conference concluded that this objective required a goal to “reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase of global temperature below 2°C”.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; By 2015, in Paris, the goal had become “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above the pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial levels”.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What we now know is that this political judgement was well wide of a scientifically-driven mark, which Hansen and his co-authors have firmly established as “return[ing] global temperature to the Holocene range within a century”.<br /><br /><i>David Spratt is Research Director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration,&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1501205489041000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHY_RkIndCJA1xhBrI7ealJe6FrxA" href="http://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/" target="_blank">www.breakthroughonline.org.au/</a></i></div>http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/07/paris-15-2c-target-far-from-safe-say.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-467924700596984174Mon, 24 Jul 2017 01:25:00 +00002017-07-24T11:25:24.263+10:003 degree impacts4 degree impactsAntarcticaArcticconflictemergency actionrisk managementA failure of imagination on climate risksBy <b>Ian Dunlop</b> and <b>David Spratt</b><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">This is an extract from <b><i><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley" target="_blank">Disaster Alley: Climate change, conflict and risk</a></i></b> published recently by Breakthrough.</blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-D2CeVTIifXw/WUkH-7DDwUI/AAAAAAAAB5A/wy2VA2QI6uU8oF3gELmTfzoVNFK_12pQACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/148cb0_ef4832a3fd3746539e0f971afbc38e53%257Emv2.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-D2CeVTIifXw/WUkH-7DDwUI/AAAAAAAAB5A/wy2VA2QI6uU8oF3gELmTfzoVNFK_12pQACK4BGAYYCw/s320/148cb0_ef4832a3fd3746539e0f971afbc38e53%257Emv2.jpg" width="257" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley" target="_blank"><b>Download the report</b></a></td></tr></tbody></table>Climate change is an existential risk that could abruptly end human civilisation because of a catastrophic “failure of imagination” by global leaders to understand and act on the science and&nbsp; evidence before them.<br /><br />At the London School of Economics in 2008, Queen Elizabeth questioned: “Why did no one foresee the timing, extent and severity of the Global Financial Crisis?” The British Academy <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jul/26/monarchy-credit-crunch" target="_blank">answered</a> a year later: “A psychology of denial gripped the financial and corporate world… [it was] the failure of the collective imagination of many bright people… to understand the risks to the system as a whole”.<br /><br />A “failure of imagination” has also been identified as one of the reasons for the breakdown in US intelligence around the 9/11 attacks in 2001.<br /><br />A similar failure is occurring with climate change today.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />The problem is widespread at the senior levels of government and global corporations. A 2016 report, <i><a href="http://www.thinkunthinkable.org/download" target="_blank">Thinking the unthinkable</a>,</i> based on interviews with top leaders around the world, found that:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">“A proliferation of ‘unthinkable’ events… has revealed a new fragility at the highest levels of corporate and public service leaderships. Their ability to spot, identify and handle unexpected, non-normative events is… perilously inadequate at critical moments… Remarkably, there remains a deep reluctance, or what might be called ‘executive myopia’, to see and contemplate even the possibility that ‘unthinkables’ might happen, let alone how to handle them. </blockquote>&nbsp;Such failures are manifested in two ways in climate policy. At the political, bureaucratic and business level in underplaying the high-end risks and in failing to recognise that the existential risk of climate change is totally different from other risk categories. And at the research level in underestimating the rate of climate change impact and costs, along with an under-emphasis on, and poor communication of, those high-end risks.<br /><br /><b>Existential risk</b><br /><br />An <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12002/abstract" target="_blank">existential risk</a> is an adverse outcome that would either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential. For example, a big meteor impact, large-scale nuclear war, or sea levels 70 metres higher than today.<br /><br />Existential risks are not amenable to the reactive (learn from failure) approach of conventional risk management, and we cannot necessarily rely on the institutions, moral norms, or social attitudes developed from our experience with managing other sorts of risks. Because the consequences are so severe — perhaps the end of human global civilisation as we know it — <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/global-catastrophic-risks-9780199606504?cc=au&amp;lang=en&amp;" target="_blank">researchers say</a> that “even for an honest, truth-seeking, and well-intentioned investigator it is difficult to think and act rationally in regard to… existential risks”.<br /><br />Yet the evidence is clear that climate change already poses an existential risk to global economic and societal stability and to human civilisation that requires an emergency response. Temperature rises that are now in prospect could reduce the global human population by 80% or 90%. But this conversation is taboo, and the few who speak out are admonished as being overly alarmist.<br /><br />Prof. Kevin Anderson <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/DFID/professor-kevin-anderson-climate-change-going-beyond-dangerous" target="_blank">considers </a>that “a 4°C future [relative to pre-industrial levels] is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable”. He <a href="http://www.webcitation.org/5ul6K9Jmt?url=http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Warming-will-39wipe-out-billions39.5867379.jp" target="_blank">says</a>: “If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4°C, 5°C or 6°C, you might have half a billion people surviving”. Asked at a 2011 conference in Melbourne about the difference between a 2°C world and a 4°C world, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber replied in two words: “Human civilisation”.<br /><br />The World Bank <a href="http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/865571468149107611/Turn-down-the-heat-why-a-4-C-warmer-world-must-be-avoided" target="_blank">reports</a>: “There is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible”. Amongst other impacts, a 4°C warming would trigger the loss of both polar ice caps, eventually resulting, at equilibrium, in a 70-metre rise in sea level.<br /><br />The present path of greenhouse gas emissions commits us to a 4–5°C temperature increase relative to pre-industrial levels. Even at 3°C of warming we could face “outright chaos” and “nuclear war is possible”, according to the 2007 <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/age-consequences" target="_blank"><i>The Age of Consequences</i></a> report by two US think tanks.<br /><br />Yet this is the world we are now entering. The Paris climate agreement voluntary emission reduction commitments, if implemented, would result in the planet warming by 3°C, with a 50% chance of exceeding that amount.<br /><br />This does not take into account “long-term” carbon-cycle feedbacks — such as permafrost thaw and declining efficiency of ocean and terrestrial carbon sinks, which are now becoming relevant. If these are considered, the Paris emissions path has more than a 50% chance of exceeding 4°C warming. (Technically, accounting for these feedbacks means using a higher figure for the system’s “climate sensitivity” — which is a measure of the temperature increase resulting from a doubling of the level of greenhouse gases — to calculate the warming. A median figure often used for climate sensitivity is ~3°C, but <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjt7ZaT3qDVAhWMEpQKHYL7DG4QFggtMAA&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fglobalchange.mit.edu%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fnewsletters%2Ffiles%2F2015%2520Energy%2520%2526%2520Climate%2520Outlook.pdf&amp;usg=AFQjCNFNbAzMf6xSpDhzY5UKRjnJ875AoA" target="_blank">research</a> from MIT shows that with a higher climate sensitivity figure of 4.5°C, which would account for feedbacks, the Paris path would lead to around 5°C of warming.)<br /><br />So we are looking at a greater than one-in-two chance of either annihilating intelligent life, or permanently and drastically curtailing its potential development.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nRqay709uhU/WW87Q2_yf2I/AAAAAAAAB5o/beG8yltkux8IxRzGX4EHwz9M2qeGrlHFQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/BT_Infographic_DAFB.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="274" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nRqay709uhU/WW87Q2_yf2I/AAAAAAAAB5o/beG8yltkux8IxRzGX4EHwz9M2qeGrlHFQCK4BGAYYCw/s400/BT_Infographic_DAFB.png" width="400" /></a><br /><br />Clearly these end-of-civilisation scenarios are not being considered even by risk-conscious leaders in politics and business, which is an epic failure of imagination.<br /><br />Of course, the world hopes to do a great deal better than Paris, but it may do far worse. A recent <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n6/full/nclimate3288.html" target="_blank">survey</a> of 656 participants involved in international climate policy-making showed only half considered the Paris climate negotiations were useful, and 70% did not expect that the majority of countries would fulfill their promises.<br /><br />Human civilisation faces unacceptably high chances of being brought undone by climate change’s existential risks yet, extraordinarily, this conversation is rarely heard.<br /><br />The Global Challenges Foundation (GCF) says that despite scientific evidence that risks associated with tipping points “increase disproportionately as temperature increases from 1°C to 2°C, and become high above 3°C”, political negotiations have consistently disregarded the high-end scenarios that could lead to abrupt or irreversible climate change. In its <a href="https://issuu.com/globalchallengesfoundation/docs/global_catastrophic_risks_2017" target="_blank"><i>Global Catastrophic Risks 2017</i></a> report, it concludes that “the world is currently completely unprepared to envisage, and even less deal with, the consequences of catastrophic climate change”. <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KI_kXEe5ph4/WW87gYxk2OI/AAAAAAAAB5w/Bb22y0xBZPMoaploCuUYVc14fLR7i_mTgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Climate-Scoreboard-011617-graph1-apr5-768x625.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="325" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KI_kXEe5ph4/WW87gYxk2OI/AAAAAAAAB5w/Bb22y0xBZPMoaploCuUYVc14fLR7i_mTgCK4BGAYYCw/s400/Climate-Scoreboard-011617-graph1-apr5-768x625.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paris emissions path (in blue), not accounting for “long-term” carbon-cycle feedbacks (Climate Interactive)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><b>Scholarly reticence</b><br /><br />The scientific community has generally underestimated the likely rate of climate change impacts and costs. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are years out of date upon publication. Sir Nicholas Stern <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/economics-current-climate-models-are-grossly-misleading-1.19416" target="_blank">wrote</a> of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report: “Essentially it reported on a body of literature that had systematically and grossly underestimated the risks [and costs] of unmanaged climate change”.<br /><br />Too often, mitigation and adaptation policy is based on least-drama, consensus scientific projections that downplay what Prof. Ross Garnaut called the “bad possibilities”, that is, the lower-probability outcomes with higher impacts. In his <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0ahUKEwipvqGN36DVAhXMJ5QKHQVPA30QFggoMAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.garnautreview.org.au%2Fupdate-2011%2Fupdate-papers%2Fup5-the-science-of-climate-change.pdf&amp;usg=AFQjCNE3xJYKELpgp0W5BKECtDX-DfiL_g" target="_blank">2011 climate science update</a> for the Australian Government, Garnaut questioned whether climate research had a conservative “systematic bias” due to “scholarly reticence”. He pointed to a pattern, across diverse intellectual fields, of research predictions being “not too far away from the mainstream” expectations and observed in the climate field that this “has been associated with understatement of the risks” <br /><br />&nbsp;In 2007, <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/age-consequences" target="_blank"><i>The Age of Consequences</i></a> reported:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">“Our group found that, generally speaking, most scientific predictions in the overall arena of climate change over the last two decades, when compared with ultimate outcomes, have been consistently below what has actually transpired. There are perhaps many reasons for this tendency—an innate scientific caution, an incomplete data set, a tendency for scientists to steer away from controversy, persistent efforts by some to discredit climate “alarmists,” to name but a few”.</blockquote>For many critical components of the climate system, we can identify just how fast our understanding is changing. Successive IPCC reports have been reticent on key climate system issues:<br /><ul><li><b>Coral reefs:</b> Just a decade or two ago, the general view in the literature was that the survival of coral systems would be threatened by 2°C warming. In 2009, <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n2/full/nclimate1674.html" target="_blank">research</a> was published suggesting that preserving more than 10% of coral reefs worldwide would require limiting warming to below 1.5°C. The coral bleaching events of the last two years at just 1-1.2°C of warming indicate that coral reefs are now sliding into global-warming-driven terminal decline. Three-quarters of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost in the last three decades, with climate change a significant cause.</li><li><b>Arctic sea ice: </b>In 2007, the IPCC reported that late summer sea-ice was “projected to disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21st century”, even as it was collapsing in the northern summer of that year. In 2014, the IPCC had ice-free projections to 2100 for only the highest of four emissions scenarios. In reality, Arctic sea ice has already lost 70% of summer volume compared to just thirty years ago, and expectations are of sea-ice-free summer within a decade or two. <b>&nbsp;</b></li><li><b>Antarctica:</b> In 2001, the IPCC projected no significant ice mass loss by 2100 and, in the 2014 report, said the contribution to sea level rise would “not exceed several tenths of a meter” by 2100. In reality, the Amundsen Sea of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sector <a href="http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/01/antarctic-tipping-points-for-multi.html" target="_blank">has been destabilised and ice retreat is unstoppable for the current climate state</a>. It is likely that no further acceleration in climate change is necessary to trigger the collapse of the rest of the ice sheet, with some scientists suggesting a 3–5 metre sea-level rise within two centuries from West Antarctic melting. </li><li><b>Sea levels</b>: In the 2007 IPCC report, sea levels were projected to rise up to 0.59 metre by 2100. The figure was widely derided by researchers, including the <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/2/2/024002" target="_blank">head of NASA’s climate research</a> as being far too conservative. By 2014, the IPCC’s figure was in the range 0.55 to 0.82 metre, but they included the caveat that “levels above the likely range cannot be reliably evaluated.” In reality, most scientists project a metre or more. The US Department of Defence uses scenarios of 1 and 2 metres for risk assessments, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides an <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiKp57836DVAhXEupQKHQhnADwQFggtMAA&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Ftidesandcurrents.noaa.gov%2Fpublications%2Ftechrpt83_Global_and_Regional_SLR_Scenarios_for_the_US_final.pdf&amp;usg=AFQjCNH3vPXJPX5izU45mS6JcrrRku1kLA" target="_blank">“extreme” scenario</a> of 2.5 metres sea level rise by 2100.</li></ul>To be useful in a risk context, climate change assessments <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7494" target="_blank">need</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">a much more thorough exploration of the [high-end] tails of the distributions of physical variables such as sea level rise, temperature, and precipitation, where our scientific knowledge base is less complete, and where sophisticated climate models are less helpful. We need greater attention on the strength of uncertain processes and feedbacks in the physical climate system [...]&nbsp; (e.g., carbon cycle feedbacks, ice sheet dynamics), as well as on institutional and behavioral feedbacks associated with energy production and consumption, to determine scientifically plausible bounds on total warming and the overall behavior of the climate system. Accomplishing this will require synthesizing multiple lines of scientific evidence [...]&nbsp;&nbsp; , including simple and complex models, physical arguments, and paleoclimate data, as well as new modeling experiments to better explore the possibility of extreme scenarios. </blockquote>A prudent risk-management approach for safeguarding people and protecting their ways of life means a tough and objective look at the real risks to which we are exposed, including climate and conflict risks, and especially those “fat tail” events whose consequences are damaging beyond quantification, and which human civilization, as we know it, would be lucky to survive. We must understand the potential of, and plan for, the worst that can happen and be relieved if it doesn’t. If we focus on "middle of the road" outcomes, and ignore the "high-end" possibilities, we will probably end up with catastrophic outcomes that could have been avoided.<br /><br />It is not a question of whether we may suffer a failure of imagination. We already have.<br /><br />Yet people understand climate risks, even as political leaders wilfully underplay or ignore them. 84% of 8000 people in eight countries recently <a href="http://news.trust.org/item/20170523230148-a90de" target="_blank">surveyed</a> for the Global Challenges Foundation consider climate change a “global catastrophic risk”. The figure for Australia was 75%. The GCF report found that many people now see climate change as a bigger threat than other concerns such as epidemics, population growth, weapons of mass destruction and the rise of artificial intelligence threats. GCF vice-president Mats Andersson says "there's certainly a huge gap between what people expect from politicians and what politicians are doing".<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FNPqhYrZrJk/WW87uWk1NoI/AAAAAAAAB54/pUniAkxT0DUZyfYF7eTT9ZA6si8uFHyPACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/risk-poll.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FNPqhYrZrJk/WW87uWk1NoI/AAAAAAAAB54/pUniAkxT0DUZyfYF7eTT9ZA6si8uFHyPACK4BGAYYCw/s400/risk-poll.jpg" width="400" /></a><br /><br />The same survey <a href="http://www.comresglobal.com/polls/global-challenges-foundation-global-risks-survey/" target="_blank">found </a>81% of the 1000 Australians polled agreed with the proposition: “Do you think we should try to prevent climate catastrophes, which might not occur for several decades or centuries, even if it requires making considerable changes that impact on our current living standards?”.<br /><br />http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/07/a-failure-of-imagination-on-climate.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-7766675472423331175Tue, 20 Jun 2017 22:02:00 +00002017-07-19T20:55:47.728+10:00Climate change an accelerant to instability in unexpected ways<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-D2CeVTIifXw/WUkH-7DDwUI/AAAAAAAAB5A/wy2VA2QI6uU8oF3gELmTfzoVNFK_12pQACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/148cb0_ef4832a3fd3746539e0f971afbc38e53%257Emv2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-D2CeVTIifXw/WUkH-7DDwUI/AAAAAAAAB5A/wy2VA2QI6uU8oF3gELmTfzoVNFK_12pQACK4BGAYYCw/s320/148cb0_ef4832a3fd3746539e0f971afbc38e53%257Emv2.jpg" width="257" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley" target="_blank"><b>Download the report</b></a></td></tr></tbody></table>by <b>Ian Dunlop</b> and <b>David Spratt</b><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">This is an extract from <a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley" target="_blank"><i><b>Disaster Alley: Climate change, security and risk</b></i></a> published today by Breakthrough National Centre from Climate Restoration.</blockquote>A hotter planet has already taken us close to, or past, tipping points which will generate major changes in global climate systems such as the oceans, polar sea ice and ice sheets and large permafrost carbon stores. The impacts include a hotter and more extreme climate, stronger storms and cyclones, drought and desertification, and coastal inundation.<br /><br />Climate change impacts basic resources such as food and water, which allow human societies to survive. Scarce resources, declining crop yields and rising prices become catalysts for conflict.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />This makes climate change a key component in international relations as it aggravates pre-existing problems to function as a “threat multiplier”, causing escalating cycles of humanitarian crises, political instability, forced migrations and conflicts. The war in Syria and conflicts across the Sahel from Darfur to Mali have a major climate-change fingerprint.<br /><br />A number of circumstances made the Syrian state extremely vulnerable to the consequences of the severe drought which hit the country a decade ago. Declining oil revenues and a fiscal deficit led the Syrian government to slash fuel subsidies in May 2008. The price of petrol tripled overnight, and pushed up food prices, whilst the state’s agriculture policies encouraged groundwater depletion. And Syria had already accepted 1.5 million refugees from Iraq. From 2006-2010, 60% of Syria had its worst long-term drought and crop failures since civilisation began. 800,000 people in rural areas had lost their livelihood by 2009. More than two million people were driven into extreme poverty, and 1.5 million people migrated to cities. The cities grew very rapidly, as did food and housing prices. The Syrian regime was unable to safeguard the people and protect their way of life, resulting in social breakdown, state failure, the rise of Islamic State and foreign military intervention. Global and regional climatic changes were major underlying causes and continued to exacerbate this already explosive situation.<br /><br />Extreme weather and climate change also played a part in the “Arab Spring”. Per capita, the world’s top nine wheat importers are in the Middle East and North Africa. The region relies on food imports for more than 30% of calories consumed, making it highly vulnerable to global food price shocks. In 2010, a heatwave and wildfires in Ukraine and Russia, and a “once-in-a-century” winter drought in China, resulted in wheat shortages and a global wheat price spike, with bread prices rocketing across the Middle East. Food riots followed in Egypt, where basic food costs were already one-third of household budgets, and became one trigger for the Arab Spring. <br /><br />The European migration crisis is a consequence of multiple conflicts, accelerated by climate change. This crisis was driven by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the civil war in Syria, the Arab Spring, political disruption across the Maghreb, and drought, desertification and war across the Sahel.<br /><br />These recent climate-accelerated conflicts also point to the changing character of the major players, and transcend old understandings, explains <a href="https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/MAB_5-8-14.pdf" target="_blank"><i>National Security Risks and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change</i></a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We are seeing the steady erosion of the nation-state as the primary international security entity. Non-state actors, such as globalized financial institutions and corporations, and even internet-empowered individuals — or the causes they represent — are having increasing impacts on the political landscape. The world has also become more politically complex and economically and financially interdependent. We believe it is no longer adequate to think of the projected climate impacts to any one region of the world in isolation. Climate change impacts transcend international borders and geographic areas of responsibility. </blockquote>Australia’s near region includes communities increasingly threatened by climate impacts and the resulting effects including dislocation and migration.<br /><br />Sixty per cent of Vietnam’s urban areas are 1.5 metres or less above sea level. The Mekong Delta provides 40% of Vietnam’s agricultural production, and more than half of national rice production and agricultural exports. Yet the Delta is also very vulnerable to coastal inundation, with over half its area less than two metres above sea level.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0urlwUQauqY/WUcT6pk66WI/AAAAAAAAB4U/nZRSMBkV2WMXl4LPB7Ef9v0UiRAtb_-MwCLcBGAs/s1600/India_Bangladesh-Barbwire-Fence-690x450.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="690" height="260" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0urlwUQauqY/WUcT6pk66WI/AAAAAAAAB4U/nZRSMBkV2WMXl4LPB7Ef9v0UiRAtb_-MwCLcBGAs/s400/India_Bangladesh-Barbwire-Fence-690x450.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">India has surrounded Bangladesh with a barbed wire fence guarded by 80,000 troops, in anticipation of a migrant crisis</td></tr></tbody></table>Bangladesh is the “ground zero” of climate change impacts, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-3988384/Military-experts-warn-epic-humanitarian-crisis-sparked-climate-change.html" target="_blank">says</a> Maj. Gen. Munir Muniruzzaman, former military adviser to the president of Bangladesh and chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change. A one-metre sea level rise would flood 20% of the area of Bangladesh and displace 30 million people. India has already surrounded Bangladesh with a double strand “climate refugee” fence patrolled by 80,000 troops, in anticipation of a migration crisis.<br /><br />Estimates of global average sea-level rise this century range from 1 to 2.5 metres, but that is just the beginning. In 2009, eminent climate scientist Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber <a href="https://uniavisen.dk/en/russian-roulette-odds-if-were-lucky/" target="_blank">warned</a> that 1°C of warming — the current state — would “in the long run translate into 15–20 meters sea level rise at equilibrium. 2°C — the target of the European Union — means sea level rise of 30–40 meters over maybe a thousand years. Draw a line around your coast, probably not a lot would be left” <br /><br />The consequences of unabated climate change cannot be resolved by an emphasis on increasing militarisation, as demonstrated by the example of sea level rise. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of climate-driven forced mass migrations, as the 2007 report <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/age-consequences" target="_blank"><i>The Age of Consequences</i></a> explains:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Perhaps the most worrisome problems associated with rising temperatures and sea levels are from large-scale migrations of people — both inside nations and across existing national borders… potentially involving hundreds of millions of people. The more severe scenarios suggest the prospect of perhaps billions of people over the medium or longer term being forced to relocate. The possibility of such a significant portion of humanity on the move, forced to relocate, poses an enormous challenge even if played out over the course of decades. </blockquote><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Hotspot: Pakistan</b></span><br /><br />Pakistan is a clear example of a country where the social and political landscape and susceptibility to climate harm are a potentially unstable mix. Increasing instability in Pakistan would contribute to the risk of instability in India and even China, which are key economic partners for Australia.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FrWAZ7Wx870/WUcUdhiimoI/AAAAAAAAB4c/DnTwpkOA6MALmgQ_dVcEvhbresa8LlV_QCLcBGAs/s1600/1401684.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="266" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FrWAZ7Wx870/WUcUdhiimoI/AAAAAAAAB4c/DnTwpkOA6MALmgQ_dVcEvhbresa8LlV_QCLcBGAs/s400/1401684.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Pakistan is a pivot state between Central and South Asia. Salafist Islamist non-state actors play a significant role in conflict in Pakistan’s immediate neighbourhood and within the country. Armed opposition groups target energy infrastructure. The military and intelligence have a powerful say in politics, the Pakistani state has a direct interest in wars in neighbouring Afghanistan and in disputed Kashmir, and it is nuclear armed.<br /><br />Climate change has contributed to recent record-breaking drought events. On 30 May 2017, the thermometer in Turbat, Balochistan hit 54°C, the hottest reliably measured temperature ever recorded in Asia. In 2010, devastating floods affected one-fifth of the land area and 20 million people, destroyed 1.7 million homes, and damaged 5.4 million acres of arable land. The damage was made worse by a shift in the distribution of monsoonal rainfall to areas of the country with poorer flood mitigation measures. Increases in the frequency and intensity of drought and flooding are consistent with climate change projections.<br /><br />Pakistan will face severe water scarcity by 2025 and according to the World Bank is “one of the most water-stressed countries in the world”, driven by changing snow melt from the Himalayan/Karakoram ranges, more variable monsoons, increases in population, inefficient drainage practices, a shift in agriculture towards more water-intensive export cropping, and competing demands for water by the agriculture and power generation sectors.<br /><br />Pakistan’s agricultural sector relies heavily on irrigation. 80% of agricultural land is irrigated (not rain-fed), the highest proportion in the world. Agriculture employs 45% of workers and cotton, textiles and clothing make up half of Pakistan’s exports.<br /><br />In quantitative terms, cubic yards of surface water available per person fell from 6880 in 1951 some to 1,358 in 2010. By 2025 it is projected to decrease to 1046 cubic yards.<br />The Indus river system is the core of Pakistan’s water system and most flow comes from Karakoram glaciers in its headwaters. There is evidence that glacial changes may be reducing river flows. The Karakoram glaciers have stable or increasing areas and possibly mass — with reduced melt flows — and are behaving differently from rapidly retreating eastern Himalaya glaciers.<br /><br />Competition for water between the agricultural and power sectors is already intense and is likely to increase.<br /><br />Decreased flows in the Indus and decisions to allocate water to irrigation instead of power generation have been in part responsible for ongoing electrical blackouts. Power shortfalls in summer are up to half of demand, with power outages of up to 18–20 hours driving protests and increasing civil unrest. In one episode in 2012 rioters “burned trains, damaged banks and gas stations, looted shops, blocked roads, and, in some instances, targeted homes of members of the National Assembly and provincial assemblies”, reports <a href="https://www.nap.edu/catalog/14682/climate-and-social-stress-implications-for-security-analysis" target="_blank"><i>Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis</i></a>.<br /><br />The blackouts are “a contentious political issue with the potential to inflame Pakistan–India relations. The Pakistani foreign minister blamed the decreased flows on illegal water withdrawals upstream by India”, although the commissioner of the Indus River System Authority in Pakistan attributed them to climate change<i>.</i><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Download </i><i><a href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/disasteralley" target="_blank"><i><b>Disaster Alley: Climate change, security and risk</b></i></a> </i></blockquote><iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="625" scrolling="no" src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fdavid.spratt.737%2Fposts%2F10154494527595741&amp;width=500" style="border: none; overflow: hidden;" width="500"></iframe>http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/06/climate-change-accelerant-to.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-4477672768464299606Mon, 12 Jun 2017 22:08:00 +00002017-06-13T08:13:36.490+10:00Will Adani’s coal mine kill 500,000 people? <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wh3pmr-iw2A/WT8PZxA6xdI/AAAAAAAAB38/TPdmeFHCp7QtO8828f8HhefdFbuVhwGagCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-06-13%2Bat%2B8.01.46%2BAM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wh3pmr-iw2A/WT8PZxA6xdI/AAAAAAAAB38/TPdmeFHCp7QtO8828f8HhefdFbuVhwGagCK4BGAYYCw/s400/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-06-13%2Bat%2B8.01.46%2BAM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr align="right"><td class="tr-caption">Credit: J.B. Russell</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><b>by Graeme Taylor</b><br /><br />If all goes as Adani plans, coal from its proposed mine in Queensland will produce enough air pollution to kill hundreds of thousands of Indians. Given that this risk is not only known but avoidable, would it be fair to say that the businessmen and politicians developing this mine will be guilty of premeditated mass murder? Here are the facts and the competing arguments: you make the call.<br /><br />Scientists found that air pollution from coal burnt to generate electricity in India <a href="http://www.indiaairquality.info/wp-content/uploads/docs/2014-08-AE-Emissions-Health-Coal-PPs-India.pdf" target="_blank">causes the premature deaths of 80,000 to 115,000 people per yea</a>r from chronic lung conditions, respiratory infections, heart diseases, strokes, bronchitis and trachea and lung cancers. 10,000 of these victims are children under the age of 5. In addition every year tens of millions of cases of asthma and other respiratory ailments are linked to coal pollution including 21 million asthma attacks. <br /><a name='more'></a><br />During the 12 month period studied (2011-2012) 503 million tons of thermal coal was burned. Since Adani <a href="http://envlaw.com.au/wp-content/uploads/carmichael14.pdf" target="_blank">plans on mining almost five times as much coal in Queensland</a> this massive project could cause half a million premature deaths and 100 million asthma attacks.<br /><br />These horrifying statistics shouldn’t come as a surprise. Breathing the filthy smog in cities like New Delhi or Beijing is equivalent to smoking one to two packs of cigarettes a day—<a href="http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/" target="_blank">one in eight people in the world now dies from air pollution</a>.<br /><br />The owners of Adani are perfectly aware that coal pollution seriously damages both human health and the environment. However, they maintain that the benefits will outweigh the costs as coal generated electricity is needed to help eliminate poverty in India and end hunger. But while this was a reasonable argument in the 20th century, it’s not valid in the 21st, as it is <a href="http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/04/12/indian-power-minister-celebrates-record-low-solar-price/" target="_blank">now cheaper</a> to source electricity from clean solar plants than from dirty coal-fired generators.<br /><br />Adani also<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/31/adani-chief-executive-says-queensland-project-will-go-ahead-this-year" target="_blank"> reasons</a> that high-quality coal from the new mine will replace low-quality coal from India and Indonesia, thereby reducing pollution from many existing thermal generating plants. Since other countries will sell India dirtier coal if Queensland coal isn’t available, building the mine is an ethical decision that will help the environment and save lives.<br /><br />This argument is called the drug dealer’s defence: if I don’t sell your kids crystal meth another dealer will—and the courts should let me deal drugs because my high-quality products won’t kill as many children as the junk sold by my competitors! <br /><br />Although the quality of Adani’s coal is <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com.au/adanis-coal-exports-be-low-quality-will-cause-air-pollution-report-1549245" target="_blank">debatable</a>, the bottom line is that even if the pollution from Queensland coal causes fewer deaths than the coal shipped from other countries, it will still kill hundreds of thousands of people. Is it possible to justify the production and sale of an additional source of pollution when safe alternatives are available? Or is developing this mine just as criminal as building a lab to manufacture deadly drugs? <br /><br />In Australia the charge of murder by recklessness applies if a person caused a death through acting in an unjustifiable manner while knowing that such an action was likely to kill or inflict grievous bodily harm. On the other hand, a charge of manslaughter by criminal negligence applies if the accused caused unintentional death by choosing to act in a reckless manner even though he was aware that he was creating a high risk of death or serious bodily injury. <br /><br />In <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/vic/VicRp/1977/50.html?stem=0&amp;synonyms=0&amp;query=title(R%20and%20nydam%20" target="_blank"><i>Nydam v R</i></a> the difference between the two offences was described as “An instance of the former might be to kill a person in a street by intentionally dropping a large block of stone from a high building into the crowded street below: an instance of the latter might be to kill a person in a street by carelessly letting fall a large block of stone from a high building into a crowded street below." <br /><br />I will leave it up to you (and lawyers) to decide whether either of these criminal charges could or should apply to the Adani mine.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b>Dr Graeme Taylor </b>is a social scientist, lecturer and writer. He is the author of <i>Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World</i>, which won the 2009 IPPY Gold Medal for the book “Most likely to save the planet”. </blockquote><br /><br />http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/06/will-adanis-coal-mine-kill-500000-people.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-7614882416380852056Mon, 29 May 2017 01:27:00 +00002017-05-29T17:46:53.420+10:00Three-quarters of Australians say climate warming "a catastrophic risk", even as government turns a blind eye&nbsp;by <b>David Spratt</b><br /><br />Published at <a href="http://reneweconomy.com.au/australians-say-climate-change-catastrophic-risk-even-government-turns-blind-eye-23556/" target="_blank">RenewEconomy</a> on 29 May 2017 <b><br /></b><br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MmCAR-oc53s/WSt1BiVUJwI/AAAAAAAAB3g/Yk67JEpT92UOWrq3yMwOOmZGu95KscpdQCK4B/s1600/Slide2.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MmCAR-oc53s/WSt1BiVUJwI/AAAAAAAAB3g/Yk67JEpT92UOWrq3yMwOOmZGu95KscpdQCK4B/s400/Slide2.jpg" width="400" /></a><br /><br />Three in four Australians understand that climate warming poses a “catastrophic risk,” even as the Australian government turns a blind eye. That was the clear result from <a href="https://www.globalchallenges.org/en/our-work/risk-survey" target="_blank">a new survey</a> for the Global Challenges Forum (GCF), and the publication of its <a href="https://www.globalchallenges.org/en/our-work/annual-report" target="_blank">2017 Global Catastrophic Risk report</a>.<br /><br />84% of 8000 people surveyed in eight countries for the GCF consider climate change a “global catastrophic risk”. The figure for the Australian sample was 75%.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />Question were asked about a number of risks, including nuclear war, pandemics, biological weapons, climate change and environmental collapse. The climate question asked how much participants agreed or disagreed that “climate change, resulting in environmental damage, such as rising sea levels or melting of icecaps” could be considered as "a global catastrophic risk”? A global catastrophic risk was described as “a future event that has the potential to affect 10% of the global population”.<br /><br />For Australia, the results were: 39% “strongly agree” and 36% “tend to agree” (for total agree of 75%); with “tend to disagree” at 15%, “strongly disagree” at 6% and 4% “don’t know”.<br /><br />The&nbsp; 2017 Global Catastrophic Risk report summarises the the evidence for catastrophic climate change risk as:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Discussions of climate change usually focus on limiting temperature rises to 1-3˚C above pre-industrial levels. A rise of 3ºC would have major impacts, with most of Bangladesh and Florida under water, major coastal cities – Shanghai, Lagos, Mumbai - swamped, and potentially large flows of climate refugees. While the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change sought to keep global temperature rises below a threshold of 1.5–2ºC, national pledges have fallen short and set the world on a 3.6°C temperature rise track. There is also now scientific consensus that, when warming rises above a certain level, self-reinforcing feedback loops are likely to set in, triggered by the pushing of the Earth’s systems – ocean circulation, permafrost, ice sheets, rainforests and atmospheric circulation – across certain tipping points. The latest science shows that tipping points with potential to cause catastrophic climate change could be triggered at 2ºC global warming. These include the risk of losing all coral reef systems on Earth and irreversible melting of inland glaciers, Arctic sea ice and potentially the Greenland ice sheet. As well as the immediate risk to human societies, the fear is that crossing these tipping points would have major impacts on the pace of global warming itself. Although climate change action has now become part of mainstream economic and social strategies, too little emphasis is put on the risk of catastrophic climate change.&nbsp;</blockquote>The same survey found 81% of the 1000 Australian participants in the poll agreed with the proposition: “Do you think we should try to prevent climate catastrophes, which might not occur for several decades or centuries, even if it requires making considerable changes that impact on our current living standards?” The figure across the 8000 people polled in eight countries (Australia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, UK, Germany and USA) was 88%.<br /><br />This shows a stronger level of support than several other polls for action that may impact on future living standards and have a personal material cost. This strong expression may, in part, be due to the framing of climate as a potentially catastrophic risk.<br /><br />The GCF report found that many people now see climate change as a bigger threat than other issues such as epidemics, population growth, use of weapons of mass destruction and the rise of artificial intelligence threats. GCF vice-president Mats Andersson <a href="http://news.trust.org/item/20170523230148-a90de" target="_blank">says</a> "there's certainly a huge gap between what people expect from politicians and what politicians are doing". <br /><br />The report says that for the first time in human history:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We have reached a level of scientific knowledge that allows us to develop an enlightened relationship to risks of catastrophic magnitude. Not only can we foresee many of the challenges ahead, but we are in a position to identify what needs to be done in order to mitigate or even eliminate some of those risks. Our enlightened status, however, also requires that we consider our own role in creating those risks, and collectively commit to reducing them. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"></blockquote>However, "the institutions we rely on to ensure peace, security, development and environmental integrity are woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenges at hand".<br /><br />The dissonance between what Australian’s understand and what government is doing is remarkable. Australia is failing in its responsibility to safeguard its people and protect their way of life. It is also failing as a world citizen, by downplaying the profound global impacts of climate change and shirking its responsibility to act.<br /><br />Australia’s per capita greenhouse emissions are in the highest rank in the world, and its commitment to reduce emissions are <a href="http://www.climateactiontracker.org/countries/australia" target="_blank">rated as inadequate by Climate Action Tracker</a>, which says that “Australia’s current policies will fall well short of meeting” its Paris Agreement target, that the Emissions Reduction Fund “does not set Australia on a path that would meet its targets” and “without accelerating climate action and additional policies, Australia will miss its 2030 target by a large margin”.<br /><br />Australia’s biggest corporations are no better. The S&amp;P/ASX All Australian 50 has the “highest embedded carbon” of any group in the S&amp;P Global 1200, according to the <a href="https://www.investordaily.com.au/markets/41246-australian-index-has-furthest-to-go-on-climate-change" target="_blank">S&amp;P Dow Jones Carbon Scorecard report</a>, which assesses global companies’ carbon footprint, fossil fuel reserve emissions, coal revenue exposure, energy transition and green-brown revenue strain. At the 2017 Santos annual general meeting, chairman Peter Coates <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/05/santos-admits-business-plan-based-4c-global-temperature-rise" target="_blank">asserted</a> that it is "sensible" and “consistent with good value” to assume for planning purposes a 4°C-warmer world.<br /><br />Former senior fossil fuel industry executive Ian Dunlop has recently noted that the most dangerous aspect of fossil-fuel investments made today is that their impacts do not manifest themselves for decades to come. If we wait for catastrophe to happen — as we are doing — it will be too late to act. Time is the most important commodity; to avoid catastrophic outcomes requires emergency action to force the pace of change. In these circumstances, opening up a major new coal province is nothing less than a crime against humanity.http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/05/australians-say-climate-warming-is.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-225844567590048382Thu, 20 Apr 2017 22:51:00 +00002017-04-21T08:58:40.492+10:00A three-track strategy for climate mitigation by Graeme Taylor<br /><br /><b>The challenge</b><br /><br />In his analysis of the Paris Agreement on mitigating climate change, The Guardian’s George Monbiot said: “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.” On one hand the outcome was better than predicted as Article 2 states that parties to the agreement will hold global average temperature increases “to well below 2°C” and “pursue efforts” to limit this to 1.5°C.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SJ7ppem70Qw/WPk6bTUzGII/AAAAAAAAB2Q/AvsxRG0loroOYS1wV3VJGNERg94SKkbEQCLcB/s1600/carbon-law.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="272" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SJ7ppem70Qw/WPk6bTUzGII/AAAAAAAAB2Q/AvsxRG0loroOYS1wV3VJGNERg94SKkbEQCLcB/s400/carbon-law.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The "carbon law" for the 2-degree target, from “A roadmap for rapid decarbonization”, Rockström, Gaffney, Rogelj, Meinshausen, Nakicenovic and Schellnhuber, Science 355: 1269-1271, 24 March 2017</td></tr></tbody></table><a name='more'></a><br />On the other hand these goals are only aspirational and current (voluntary) climate mitigation commitments are too limited and too slow to prevent catastrophic outcomes. There is an enormous (and currently unbridgeable) lag between the pace of political, economic and technological change and the rapid (non-negotiable) rate of climate change. <br /><br />To ensure safe outcomes the global economy will have to be rapidly restructured. This will require a massive response similar in scale and urgency to the Allied effort in World War II. However, at this time strong international action is a distant dream.<br /><br />Most experts assume that even under the most optimistic scenarios aggregate emissions will increase until mid-century, pushing global temperatures far past international goals. The hope is that this overshoot will be corrected over time with as yet undeveloped technologies for carbon capture and storage.<br /><br />These scenarios also assume that during the period of overshoot most human and natural systems will be able to adapt to changing conditions. Critics argue that these assumptions are dangerously wrong: many critical thresholds are being and will be passed with irreversible, catastrophic consequences such as the loss of much of the cryosphere and ocean acidification.<br /><br />In addition the Paris negotiations were constrained by the need to work within existing political and economic frameworks. At the diplomatic level strong initiatives are resisted by institutional inertia, opposed by vested interests, and hobbled by the fragmented nature of global governance. Because governments with differing priorities and interests tend to agree on the lowest common denominators, to date commitments have supported reactive, incremental and partial responses: e.g. prioritising voluntary adaptation and technological solutions over mandatory prevention and systemic change.<br /><br />For these reasons existing strategies are unlikely to produce the radical transformations required to rapidly end carbon pollution: for example no comprehensive plans exist for making the transition to a sustainable global system.<br /><br />An opposite approach is required: one that starts by determining what is necessary to achieve safe outcomes and then backcasts to design and develop viable solutions. While this proactive ‘critical-safety’ approach is widely used to manage risk in complex industrial and military projects (e.g. aviation), it is not being used by governments to manage climate risk. The problem is that although it will not be possible to preserve critical ecosystems without imposing internationally enforceable limits on pollution and consumption, all attempts to introduce enforceable limits are strongly resisted by both the world’s economic institutions (designed to support constant growth), and by the fiercely independent political institutions of the nation state system.<br /><br />As a consequence the fundamental challenge facing climate mitigation efforts&nbsp; is finding a way to manage the conflict between the need to work within existing institutional frameworks and the reality that they are not (and may be incapable of) acting quickly enough to prevent catastrophic outcomes. It will only be possible to resolve this dichotomy with holistic, integrative methods. This paper proposes using a multi-track approach in which three different but complementary strategic campaigns work in parallel to accelerate systemic transformation. <br /><br /><b>A three track strategy</b><br /><br />An effective strategy must address both short and long term goals: the need to greatly intensify current climate mitigation efforts within the next 5-10 years to avoid passing irreversible environmental tipping points, while simultaneously catalysing the structural changes required to produce a safe, stable climate by mid-century.<br /><br /><b>Track 1: A strategic campaign to strengthen climate mitigation</b><br /><br />The first track will work within official institutions to intensify climate mitigation efforts. It will argue that a proactive, critical-safety, whole-systems approach is needed to ensure safe outcomes and reframe climate change as an immediate existential threat requiring an international emergency response.<br /><br />Although creating a safe, stable climate will ultimately require systemic redesign, the Track 1 goals are more immediate: to build political and institutional support for emergency measures to stop and reverse dangerous global warming (e.g. geoengineering), and for actions that facilitate the transformation to a sustainable system (e.g. introducing carbon taxes and accelerating R&amp;D into non-polluting processes for producing energy and goods).<br /><br />Climate mitigation efforts will be accelerated through (1) redefining climate change as an urgent international security risk (rather than as a primarily environmental problem); (2) clarifying the requirements for a safe global climate; (3) identifying the technologies and actions required to prevent dangerous climate change; (4) progressively building scientific and political support for these interventions; and (5) developing national and international alliances that both encourage and pressure decision-makers at all levels to take emergency global action.<br /><br /><b>Track 2: A strategic campaign to win the ideological debate</b><br /><br />Humanity’s major challenges are not technological but social. For this reason the second track will clarify the need for transformational change: why creating a safe, sustainable future is both necessary and desirable. It will focus on subjective issues of ethics and meaning, and explore ways to reframe dysfunctional values and perspectives in ways that support conflict resolution and sustainable solutions. Its practical task will be to develop positive narratives that clearly and simply explain why it is necessary, feasible and desirable to create a safe, sustainable future. Its purpose will be to build support and inspire action. <br /><br />Climate change is ultimately the byproduct of a dysfunctional system and the same values, interests and institutions that cause the problem are neither willing nor able to solve it. The dominant global world view and political economy with its focus on endless growth, the consumer worldview, and the fragmented nature of global governance present almost insuperable obstacles to climate mitigation.<br /><br />The key is to reframe climate change in both security and ethical terms. Our strongest argument against the selfish, short-sighted values of consumerism is that we have a responsibility to our children to leave them a healthy, sustainable planet.<br /><br />Driving our unsustainable global economy is an unethical culture. We will not be able to create a sustainable system without changing the culture from one based on the exploitation of nature and other humans to one based on respect and mutual benefit. The consumer culture creates false needs for power, status and wealth (‘greeds’) instead of satisfying real needs for health, community and meaning. Because consuming cannot satisfy social and spiritual needs, people will never feel that they have enough.<br /><br />Social movements like the struggles for democracy, against slavery, or for women’s rights required, demanded and created structural changes. Climate mitigation requires even deeper structural change, and to be successful it must have the moral force and dynamism of a social movement. This is happening: environmental organisations have already organized the largest global demonstrations in history.<br /><br /><b>Track 3: A strategic campaign to accelerate systemic change</b><br /><br />The focus of the third track is on accelerating the structural changes needed to prevent the catastrophic collapse of nature and society. A whole-system paradigm shift is required to transform our exploitative, self-destructive consumer society into a caring, sustainable conserver society.<br /><br />This approach will primarily work at the level of civil society to accelerate and empower structural transformation. It will focus on supporting the evolution of an environmentally and socially sustainable global system: e.g. by defining the requirements for a sustainable system; identifying transformational technologies, social structures, and memes; aligning forces working to empower change; and developing a common strategic framework.<br /><br />We are now in a period of evolutionary change. On one hand the industrial system is no longer environmentally sustainable, which means that it must either evolve into a sustainable system or collapse. On the other hand, a new ecological paradigm has begun to emerge with the potential to organize a sustainable planetary civilization. (Since societal systems are organized by world-views, the core requirement of a sustainable system is an ecologically relevant world-view that recognizes the interdependence of all life on earth, and the need of all life for health and wholeness.)<br /><br />A precondition for an evolutionary shift is the creation of mutually supportive functional synergies. Track 3 will accelerate structural transformation through helping the emerging social and technological elements of the new sustainable system come together through a process of collaboration, convergence and confluence. The development of a constructive holistic alternative to our destructive global system will support the rapid evolution of a new type of sustainable system.<br /><br />Our species already has the knowledge and technology to create a clean, lean and equitable economy capable of operating within our planet’s carrying capacity. The most critical risks are well known and credible solutions have been proposed.&nbsp; Decisive interventions could prevent catastrophic environmental, economic and social collapses and accelerate the transformation to a sustainable world system. But because vested interests will resist efforts to regulate and ration the consumption of essential goods and services, major structural changes are unlikely to take place until the current system loses its ability to manage worsening global crises.<br /><br />Because our global system is environmentally and socially unsustainable, environmental, economic and political crises are likely to intensify over the coming decades. These worsening crises will expose the ideological and structural failings of existing institutions and increase demands for alternative approaches. Political tipping points will develop that will lead either to systemic transformation or collapse.<br /><br />On the positive side three forces are growing and converging to support change: awareness that greatest security threats we face are worsening environmental problems; opposition to widening economic and political inequality; and calls (from Pope Francis and other leaders) for a more ethical global system. Understanding that environmental, economic and social problems are interconnected is the key to change.<br /><br />It will be possible to create a sustainable world if the current global system is restructured to:<br /><ul><li>Regulate and restrict resource use to ensure that the economy operates within sustainable environmental and social parameters. &nbsp;Ensure that all humans, species and ecosystems can access essential resources (those needed to maintain health and wholeness).&nbsp;</li><li>Create an ethical, caring culture that recognizes the interdependence of individuals, society and nature; that focuses on meeting real needs rather than false greeds; that values quality over quantity, and health and happiness over wealth and status.&nbsp;&nbsp; </li></ul>Of course clarifying the major systemic problems and solutions is only the first step. We then have to determine how we can implement the necessary changes. This will require:<br /><ul><li><b>Vision:</b> a positive, ethical narrative and vision that a peaceful, sustainable world is both necessary and possible.</li><li><b>Strategy:</b> a clear strategy for global transformation.</li><li><b>Leadership:</b> support for the vision and strategy from a coalition of credible leaders representing a wide spectrum of cultures, institutions, and political and religious views.</li><li><b>Empowerment:</b> transformational media, social and technological tools designed to inform, catalyze and empower constructive change.</li><li><b>Organization:</b> aligning the forces supporting sustainable outcomes, and facilitating the self-organization of a synergistic “super-campaign” pursued at all levels of our interdependent global system.</li></ul>It will be an enormous challenge to create a sustainable world, but one our species must and can accomplish. The future is not fate—it is our choice.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A longer (referenced) version of this article is available at: <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1946756716673640">http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1946756716673640</a></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Graeme Taylor may be contacted at: <a href="mailto:graeme@bestfutures.org">graeme@bestfutures.org</a></span></blockquote>http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/04/a-three-track-strategy-for-climate.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-4425313767374278019Sat, 01 Apr 2017 09:19:00 +00002017-04-03T08:40:37.572+10:00cyclonesextreme weatherClimate change pushing floods, cyclones to new extremes, with worse to come<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YJYvmDq8DUs/WN9tR4MLx4I/AAAAAAAAB1U/dwgR89ZhEgIdfUwoWHB6REF3iQXOgTnZgCLcB/s1600/8406628-3x2-700x467.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YJYvmDq8DUs/WN9tR4MLx4I/AAAAAAAAB1U/dwgR89ZhEgIdfUwoWHB6REF3iQXOgTnZgCLcB/s400/8406628-3x2-700x467.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />&nbsp;With Australia experiencing the aftermath of Cyclone Debbie and record-breaking rains and severe flooding in south-east Queensland and along the north coast of New South Wales, here’s a look at how global warming has, and will, push floods and cyclones to new extremes.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Flooding extremes</b></span><br /><br />Warm air can be more humid than cold air, that is, it can hold more water vapour in absolute terms. And atmospheric water vapour content increases seven per cent for each 1-degree-Celsius increase in global average temperature, establishing the conditions for more intense rainfall events. <br /><a name='more'></a><br />Flash floods are likely to sweep across the Australian landscape with increasing intensity, particularly in urban or residential areas. Peak rainfall is <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n7/abs/ngeo2456.html" target="_blank">predicted</a> to soar with rising surface temperatures as Australia experiences ever greater extremes of heat.&nbsp; <br /><br />The frequency of major flood events (defined as events which caused extensive flooding within 50 kilometres of the coast, or inundation that extended 20 kilometres along the coast) along Australia's eastern seaboard has doubled in last 150 years, with climate change one of the possible factors, <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/eastern-australian-flood-events-a-significant-rise-in-frequency-says-study-20160617-gplbwi.html%E2%80%A8" target="_blank">senior Bureau of Meteorology researchers</a> say. <br /><br />Record-breaking heavy rainfall and a clear upward trend in downpours over the last 30 years fits in with global temperature rise caused by greenhouse gases. <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-015-1434-y%E2%80%A8" target="_blank">Statistical analysis</a> of rainfall data from 1901 to 2010 around the globe, shows that from 1980 to 2010 there were 12% more of these intense events than would be expected in a climate without global warming. Wet regions generally saw a bigger increase in deluges and drier regions a smaller one. In southeast Asia, the observed increase in record-breaking rainfall events is as high as 56%.<br /><br /><b>Giant air streams pushing new extremes:</b> The increase of devastating weather extremes in summer, including floods, is likely linked to human-made climate change, mounting evidence shows, with the <a href="http://www.nature.com/articles/srep45242" target="_blank">recent discovery</a> of giant airstreams circling the Earth, waving up and down between the Arctic and the tropics. These planetary waves transport heat and moisture. When these planetary waves stall, droughts or floods can occur. Warming caused by greenhouse-gases from fossil fuels creates favourable conditions for such events.<br /><br />&nbsp;“The unprecedented 2016 California drought, the 2011 U.S. heatwave and 2010 Pakistan flood as well as the 2003 European hot spell all belong to a most worrying series of extremes,” <a href="https://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/weather-extremes-humans-likely-influence-giant-airstreams" target="_blank">says Michael Mann</a>, a lead author of the study. “The increased incidence of these events exceeds what we would expect from the direct effects of global warming alone, so there must be an additional climate change effect. In data from computer simulations as well as observations, we identify changes that favour unusually persistent, extreme meanders of the jet stream that support such extreme weather events. Human activity has been suspected of contributing to this pattern before, but now we uncover a clear fingerprint of human activity.”<br /><br /><b>Attribution studies</b> show how the risk of a particular event may have changed due to the human influence on climate. Some attribution results <a href="http://public.wmo.int/en/resources/bulletin/unnatural-disasters-communicating-linkages-between-extreme-events-and-climate" target="_blank">surveyed by the World Meteorological Organisation</a> include:<br /><ul><li> The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined that human-caused climate change increased chances of the fatal and record rains in Louisiana by at least 40% percent and could have nearly doubled the odds of such a storm.</li><li>A scientific analysis of devastating 2014 floods in the United Kingdom, which cost an estimated $646 million in insurance losses, found that human-caused climate change has increased the chance of the extreme rain event by 43%.</li><li>In May-June 2016, portions of northeast France received six full weeks of rain in 24-hours. A formal attribution study released June 9, 2016, found that such extreme rains are at least 40 percent—and as much as 90 percent—more likely in some areas of France. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </li></ul><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Cyclone extremes</b></span><br /><br />Cyclones, in part, draw their energy from the temperature of the ocean's surface waters, so a warming climate and ocean puts more energy into storms, including cyclones, loading them with more rainfall, and stronger winds pushing more of a storm surge.<br /><br /><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fCZFf8SaA1c/WN9uotHBeQI/AAAAAAAAB1g/aA_WU6ynjXAsHpPMa357rPlgi518pBXGACLcB/s1600/TC-Debbie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fCZFf8SaA1c/WN9uotHBeQI/AAAAAAAAB1g/aA_WU6ynjXAsHpPMa357rPlgi518pBXGACLcB/s320/TC-Debbie.jpg" width="320" /></a>The recent <a href="https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/fact-sheet-tropical-cyclones-and-climate-change" target="_blank">Climate Council brief </a>notes, “Increasing temperature of the surface ocean affects the intensity of cyclones, both maximum wind speeds and in the intensity of rainfall that occurs in association with the cyclone.”&nbsp; The force exerted on buildings and structures when cyclones make landfall increases disproportionately with wind speed.<br /><br />The Council also notes that: “Tropical cyclones form most readily when there are very warm conditions at the ocean surface and when the vertical temperature gradient through the atmosphere is strong. As this vertical gradient weakens as the climate continues to warm, it is likely that fewer tropical cyclones will form”. <br /><br />Whilst the best evidence scientists suggest cyclones unlikely to increase in number, a <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/110/30/12219.abstract" target="_blank">2013 study</a> challenges the status quo, suggesting they will occur more frequently, as well becoming more intense. <br /><br />In 2013, <a href="http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00262.1" target="_blank">researchers reported</a> that the stronger hurricanes in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and South Indian Oceans have become more intense.&nbsp; The same year, the UN meteorological agency <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-14/climate-change-making-super-typhoons-worse/5090724" target="_blank">concluded</a> that climate change is making super typhoons worse. <br /><br />In 2015, an <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/super-typhoons-to-increase-in-strength-with-climate-change-researchers-find-20150529-ghcbfs.html" target="_blank">international research team</a> found that a warming planet is already stoking the intensity of tropical cyclones in the north-west Pacific and their ferocity will continue to increase even with moderate climate change over this century.<br /><br />More broadly, a <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n3/abs/ngeo779.html" target="_blank">2010 study</a> found that "future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2–11% by 2100....&nbsp; higher resolution modelling studies typically project substantial increases in the frequency of the most intense cyclones, and increases of the order of 20% in the precipitation rate within 100 km of the storm centre.<br /><br /><b>Recent records</b><br /><br />With sustained wind speeds of more than 310 kilometres per hour, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in November 2013 was <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/did-climate-change-cause-typhoon-haiyan-1.14139" target="_blank">the most powerful tropical cyclone to make landfall</a> in recorded history. The previous record was held by Hurricane Camille, which in 1969 hit the state of Mississippi with wind speeds of just over 300 km/h. Data compiled from the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/typhoon-haiyan-influenced-by-climate-change-scientists-say-20131111-2xb35.html" target="_blank">US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration</a> shows sea temperatures were about 0.5 to 1 degree Celsius above normal in the waters to the east of the Philippines as Haiyan began forming. The waters cooled in the storm's wake, an indication of how the storm sucked up energy. &nbsp; <br /><br />Hurricane Patricia which hit Mexico in October 2015 achieved a record peak intensity with maximum sustained winds 345 km/h, making it the most intense tropical cyclone on record in the Western Hemisphere, and the strongest globally in terms of 1-minute maximum sustained winds. Cyclone Winston in February 2016 was the strongest tropical cyclone to make landfall in Fiji and the South Pacific Basin in recorded history.<br /><br /><b>Attribution studies </b><br /><ul><li>Superstorm Sandy which hit the north-east coast of the USA with devastating effect in October 2012 was made worse by unusually warm waters with increased the hurricane’s intensity. As well, human-caused sea level rise added to the storm surge, and on the stretch of the Atlantic Coast that spans from Norfolk to Boston, sea levels have been rising four times faster than the global average. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/jun/22/new-study-links-global-warming-to-hurricane-sandy-and-other-extreme-weather-events" target="_blank">Researchers say</a> that “It is possible that subways and tunnels may not have been flooded without the warming-induced increases in sea level and storm intensity and size.”&nbsp; More broadly, <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n8/full/nclimate2657.html" target="_blank">the authors say</a> that “‘snowmaggedon’ in February 2010, superstorm Sandy in October 2012 and supertyphoon Haiyan in November 2013, and the Boulder floods of September 2013, all&nbsp; were influenced by high sea surface temperatures that had a discernible human component.</li><li>The Climate Council <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-19/climate-change-exacerabated-cyclone-pam-damage/6331160" target="_blank">reported</a> that climate change exacerbated the damage caused by Cyclone Pam, which left a trail of destruction across Vanuatu in 2015.</li></ul><b>Damage </b><br /><br />Reinsurance giant, MunichRe, <a href="http://www.munichre.com/en/reinsurance/magazine/publications/knowledge-series/natural-hazards/severe-weather-asia.aspx" target="_blank">says that</a> "nowhere in the world are weather risks changing faster than in Eastern Asia", and <a href="http://www.munichre.com/app_pages/www/@res/pdf/downloads/severe-weather-in-eastern-asia-executive-summary-en.pdf" target="_blank">concludes that</a> "as a result of climate change... the intensity of typhoons will increase" in Eastern Asia.&nbsp; On 11 November 2013, in the aftermath of super-typhoon Haiyan, MunichRe <a href="http://www.munichre.com/en/media_relations/press_releases/2013/2013_11_11_press_release.aspx" target="_blank">surveyed</a> losses:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Eastern Asia has been hard hit by weather-related loss events in the past three decades. Their number has increased by more than a factor of four, causing overall losses from weather-related events of some US$ 700bn during this period. The insured losses of US$ 76bn amounted to only around 10% of overall losses, with 62% of these attributable to Japan. Floods caused 56% of the overall losses in Eastern Asia, but only 30% of insured losses. The number of floods has increased strongly and is expected to increase further in the coming decades. With insured losses of US$ 16bn, the 2011 Thailand floods caused the biggest-ever weather-related insured loss in the region. After floods, it is typhoons that cause the greatest weather-related losses. New analyses indicate a clear cycle of activity for typhoons, and increased typhoon activity is expected over the coming years..."</blockquote>And in Australia, <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/business/cyclone-the-size-of-debbie-could-be-catastrophic-for-gold-coast-modelling-shows-20170329-gv97ie.html" target="_blank"><i>The Age</i> reports</a> that new modelling has shown that a cyclone the size of Debbie could&nbsp;have catastrophic&nbsp;consequences on the Gold Coast and as far as Brisbane, with winds of 260km/h, in areas where many homes and towers do not meet cyclonic safety standards. As climate change pushes cyclones further south, tens of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure is at risk. Actuaries, who predict and model scenarios for banks and insurers, have warned properties could become "uninsurable" as premiums rise up to 250% to meet this global warming challenge.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/04/climate-change-pushing-floods-cyclones.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-7068110034882652926Sat, 18 Mar 2017 02:31:00 +00002017-03-18T14:27:09.614+11:00Meet Sherri Goodman, who in two words made the military care about climate change<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L13db8zLoOI/WMyW-isLGzI/AAAAAAAAB0o/GHUOVwHtQecpyMGuyFDUPBbnQYMhB2W9gCLcB/s1600/goodman23-C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L13db8zLoOI/WMyW-isLGzI/AAAAAAAAB0o/GHUOVwHtQecpyMGuyFDUPBbnQYMhB2W9gCLcB/s1600/goodman23-C.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>“The Age of Consequences” climate film <br />and speaking tour</b></span></div><br />The Buzzfeed story lead says it all:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/the-threat-multiplier?utm_term=.ap1akxEZqA#.ewl5Ddakvq" target="_blank">“Meet the woman whose two-word catchphrase made the military care about climate”</a>&nbsp;. That woman is Sherri Goodman, and she will be in Australia in early April. And the film about climate change and the military will be on ABC TV's 4 Corners next Monday&nbsp;night. <br /><br />The national security dimension of climate change receives little attention in Australia, but is the subject of intense focus overseas, particularly in the United States. Climate change interacts with other pre-existing problems to become an accelerant to instability in unexpected ways. Scarce resources, growing water scarcity, declining crop yields, rising food prices, extreme weather events and health impacts become catalysts for instability and conflict, especially in Asia. This has profound implications for Australia, economically and socially, quite apart from the climate change impact on Australia itself.<br /><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>“The Age of Consequences”&nbsp;on 4 Corners</b></span></div><br />You are unlikely to ever see another climate film like “The Age of Consequences”, so tune into 4 Corners at 8.30pm on Monday night, and find out how the US military really see the challenges of global warming. And yes, they really do get it. &nbsp;A lot better than most politicians. <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b>SCREENING DETAILS:</b> “The Age of Consequences”, from PBS International, directed by Jared P Scott and presented by Sarah Ferguson, goes to air on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2017/03/16/4637278.htm" target="_blank"><b>Monday 20 March at 8.30pm</b></a>&nbsp;EDT. Replayed on Tuesday 21 March at 10.00am and Wednesday 22 at 11pm. It can also be seen on ABC News 24 on Saturday at 8pm, and at ABC iview.</blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This striking documentary investigates the accelerating impact of climate change on increased resource scarcity, migration, and conflict through the lens of US national security and global stability. Through unflinching case-study analysis, distinguished admirals, generals and military veterans take us beyond the headlines of the &nbsp;conflict in Syria, the social unrest of the Arab Spring, the rise of radicalized groups like ISIS, and the European refugee crisis – and lay bare how climate change interacts with societal tensions, sparking conflict. Whether long-term vulnerabilities or sudden shocks, the film unpacks how water and food shortages, drought, extreme weather, and sea-level rise function as “accelerants of instability” and “catalysts for conflict” in volatile regions of the world.</div><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>“Age of Consequences”&nbsp;speaking tour</b></span><br /><br />Sherri Goodman will be touring Australia in the first week of April. &nbsp;As well as meeting with government, business, and national security think-tanks, and extensive media engagement, Ms Goodman will be speaking at three public events:<br /><br /><b>SYDNEY</b><br />Lowy Institute: "The forgotten dimension: Climate change and national security” <br />5.45-7.30pm Tuesday 4 April, Lowy Institute, Level 3/1 Bligh St, Sydney<br />Includes panel discussion with Sherri Goodman, Ian Dunlop, an international oil, gas and coal industry expert and former chair of the Australian Coal Association and Alan Dupont, Non-resident Fellow at the Lowy Institute and CEO of the Cognoscenti Group. <br />Tickets&nbsp;<a href="https://myaccount.lowyinstitute.org/events/THE-FORGOTTEN-DIMENSION-CLIMATE-CHANGE-AND-NATIONAL-SECURITY" target="_blank">here</a><br /><br /><b>CANBERRA</b><br />Film and Q&amp;A with Sherri Goodman<br />6.30-8.30pm Wednesday &nbsp;5 April (light refreshments at 6pm)<br />H.C. Coombs Lecture Theatre, ANU, Fellows Road, Acton<br />Register at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-age-of-consequences-tickets-32486271312" target="_blank">Eventbrite </a><br /><b><br />MELBOURNE</b><br />Breakthrough public forum with Sherri Goodman<br />6-7.15pm Thursday 6 April<br />LAB-14, 700 Swanston Street, Carlton<br />Register at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/sherri-goodman-tickets-32874313958" target="_blank">Eventbrite</a><br /><br />Sherri Goodman&nbsp;is a former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security. From 2001-2015, she served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel of CNA, a non-profit research body that provides analyses and solutions for national security leaders. Sherri is also the Founder and Executive Director of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cna.org/mab/" target="_blank">CNA Military Advisory Board</a>&nbsp; whose landmark reports include “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” (2007), and “National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change” (2014).<br /><br />Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration&nbsp;is hosting the Sherri Goodman tour.<br /><br /><b>Events we cannot ignore</b><br /><br />So what will you learn from “The Age of Consequences” and Sherri Goodman? &nbsp;Here are a few starters:<br /><br />ARAB SPRING: Per capita, the world’s top nine wheat importers are in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2010, a heatwave and wild fires in Ukraine and Russia, and a “once-in-a-century” winter drought in China, resulted in wheat shortages and a global wheat price spike, with rocketing bread prices across the Middle East. Food riots resulted in countries such as Egypt, where basic food costs are one-third of household budget, and became a trigger for the “Arab Spring”.<br /><br />SYRIA: From 2006-2010, sixty per cent of Syria had its worst long-term drought and crop failures since civilisation began. 800,000 people in rural areas had lost their livelihood by 2009. Two-to-three million people were driven into extreme poverty, and 1.5 million people migrated to Syrian cities, which had already received a similar number of Iraqi war refugees. The cities grew very rapidly, as did food and apartment prices. The resultant social breakdown, state failure, and the rise of Islamic State was a reaction to a regime unable to adequately respond, but global and regional climatic changes were major underlying causes.<br /><br />EUROPEAN MIGRATION CRISIS: The European migration crisis is an example of reciprocal interactions between intersecting crisis becoming an accelerant to instability in unexpected ways, with the intersection of: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and displacement; the civil war in Syria; the Arab Spring and displacement across the Maghreb; and drought and desertification, war and displacement across the Sahel.<br /><br />BANGLADESH: Bangladesh is the ground zero of climate change. A one-metre sea level rise will flood 20% of the land mass and displace 30 million people. India has surrounded Bangladesh with a double security “climate refugee” fence patrolled by 80,000 troops.<br /><br />This is a world we ignore at our peril. <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/03/meet-sherri-goodman-who-in-two-words.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1429546711699806111.post-376340336374084630Fri, 17 Feb 2017 01:00:00 +00002017-02-27T10:08:31.648+11:00Antarcticatipping pointsAntarctic tipping points for a multi-metre sea level riseby <b>David Spratt</b><br /><br />First published 23 January 2017; updated 17 February 2017 <br /><br /><br /><b><a href="http://leclimatoblogue.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/points-de-basculement-atteints-en.html" target="_blank">Read in French</a></b><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5wy0i7APibE/WJV-XHQDvGI/AAAAAAAABzY/qn3yrQEbzcYTLxb-oVKQ5vIhYFfPyzG8gCLcB/s1600/AntarcticTippingPoints.250px.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5wy0i7APibE/WJV-XHQDvGI/AAAAAAAABzY/qn3yrQEbzcYTLxb-oVKQ5vIhYFfPyzG8gCLcB/s1600/AntarcticTippingPoints.250px.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://media.wix.com/ugd/148cb0_a06ec671eed14a6f8f37e2145175f63f.pdf" target="_blank"><b>DOWNLOAD REPORT</b></a></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br />OVERVIEW</b></span><br /><ul><li>The Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has most likely been destabilized and ice retreat is unstoppable for the current conditions.</li><li>No further acceleration in climate change is necessary to trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with loss of a significant fraction on a decadal to century time scale.</li><li>Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100.</li><li>A large fraction of West Antarctic basin ice could be gone within two centuries, causing a 3–5 metre sea level rise.</li><li>Mechanisms similar to those causing deglaciation in West Antarctica are now also found in East Antarctica.</li><li>Partial deglaciation of the East Antarctic ice sheet is likely for the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, contributing to 10 metres of more of sea level rise in the longer run, and 5 metres in the first 200 years.<a name='more'></a></li></ul><span style="font-size: small;"><b><a href="http://media.wix.com/ugd/148cb0_a06ec671eed14a6f8f37e2145175f63f.pdf" target="_blank">Download report</a> </b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><b>INTRODUCTION</b></span><br /><br /><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fWw5VZEL-Vk/WIVBY9FhWlI/AAAAAAAABxw/onGvnopVzL02SVFASnxFPt0shrvQktW0gCLcB/s1600/Screen%252BShot%252B2014-05-21%252Bat%252B4.21.54%252Bam.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fWw5VZEL-Vk/WIVBY9FhWlI/AAAAAAAABxw/onGvnopVzL02SVFASnxFPt0shrvQktW0gCLcB/s320/Screen%252BShot%252B2014-05-21%252Bat%252B4.21.54%252Bam.png" width="320" /></a>The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), comprising more than two million cubic kilometres of ice, is under pressure from a warming climate, with scientists saying its break-up –– and an eventual global sea-level rise of 3–5 metres –– is not matter of if, but when.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The West Antarctic Peninsula is now the strongest-warming region on the planet, and WAIS glaciers are discharging ice at an accelerating rate (Rignot, Velicogna at al (2011) <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011GL046583/abstract"><b>“Acceleration of the contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise”</b></a>, GRL 38: L05503-7; Mouginot, Rignot and Scheuchl (2014) <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013GL059069/abstract"><b>“Sustained increase in ice discharge from the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica, from 1973 to 2013”</b></a>, GRL 41:1576-1584).<br /><br />Recent studies, surveyed in this report,&nbsp; suggest that WAIS passed a tipping point for large-scale deglaciation decades ago.<br /><br />This should not be surprising, because such an event was foreseen almost 50 years ago. In 1968, pioneer glacier researcher John Mercer predicted that the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula could herald the loss of the ice sheet. Ten years later, Mercer contended that "a major disaster — a rapid deglaciation of West Antarctica — may be in progress … within about 50 years” (<a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v271/n5643/abs/271321a0.html"><b>“West Antarctic ice sheet and CO2 greenhouse effect: a threat of disaster”</b></a>, Nature 271:321-325).<br /><br />He said that warming “above a critical level would remove all ice shelves, and consequently all ice grounded below sea level, resulting in the deglaciation of most of West Antarctica”. Such disintegration, once under way, would “probably be rapid, perhaps catastrophically so”, with most of the ice sheet lost in a century. Credited with coining the phrase “the greenhouse effect” in the early 1960s, Mercer’s Antarctic prognosis was widely ignored and disparaged at the time. Now in seems uncannily prescient.<br /><br />Climate author Fred Pearce (in his 2007 book <a href="http://www.beacon.org/With-Speed-and-Violence-P1123.aspx"><b>“With Speed and Violence”</b></a>) quotes the leading cryosphere scientist Richard Alley as saying a decade ago that there is “a possibility that the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and raise sea levels by 6 yards [5.5 metres]” this century. Pearce also interviewed NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot who has studied the Pine Island glacier in West Antarctica for decades, and concluded that “the glacier is primed for runaway destruction”.<br /><br />Although the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) — with potential for a 50-metre sea-level rise if all ice were lost — has generally been considered more stable than WAIS, recent evidence suggests some outlet glaciers there are displaying similar dynamics to those on West Antarctica. <br /><br /><b>GEOGRAPHY</b><br /><br />An ice shelf is a floating sheet, or platform, of ice that is largely submerged and, up to two kilometres in height, that abuts a land-based glacier, and extends into the ocean.&nbsp; The “grounding line” marks the boundary between grounded ice (glacier) and the floating ice shelf. Generally, an ice shelf will lose volume by calving icebergs from the seaward-facing edge, but it can also be subject to rapid disintegration events, in which cracking can dislodge very large sections of ice. The <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/rift-in-antarcticas-larsen-c-ice-shelf">formation of a huge crack</a> — 100 kms long, half a kilometre wide and a hundred metes deep — in the Larsen C ice shelf is one recent example.<br /><br />Warming Antarctic waters are melting and thinning the underside of ice shelves, making them more susceptible to disintegration. Ice shelves act as a “plug” that buttresses and slow the rate at which glaciers drain into the ocean, so the loss or diminution of the ice shelf will accelerate the pace of glacier movement and hence the rate of ice mass loss.<br /><br />Because much of WAIS sits on bedrock that is below sea level (buttressed on two sides by mountains, and held in place on the other two sides by the Ronne and Ross ice shelves), melting of the submerged ice shelf allows warm ocean waters to proceed inland under the ice sheet.&nbsp; This creates hidden valleys of melting ice, puts pressure on the surface above, and contributes to large-scale rifting (cracking). This process also results in the grounding line being pushed further inland, in effect transforming the lower reaches of the glacier into an ice shelf.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0U9yH3GIaBU/WIVBuGAL4LI/AAAAAAAABx0/rzNhlN3ah1caN-7hggSD7qdG2QgzQQ0HgCLcB/s1600/AntarcticShelfDiagram.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="246" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0U9yH3GIaBU/WIVBuGAL4LI/AAAAAAAABx0/rzNhlN3ah1caN-7hggSD7qdG2QgzQQ0HgCLcB/s400/AntarcticShelfDiagram.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Over the past 40 years, glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea sector of WAIS (including Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers) have thinned at an accelerating rate, and observations and several numerical models suggest that unstable and irreversible retreat of the grounding line is under way.<br /><br />Whilst it is traditionally considered that WAIS deglaciation would take a thousand years or more, some experts have suggested in could occur in a period as short as a couple of centuries because the rate of change in atmospheric greenhouse gases and in the global temperature are unprecedented.<br /><br /><b>RECENT RESEARCH: WEST ANTARCTICA</b><br /><ul><li>Rignot, Mouginot et al (2014) <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL060140/abstract"><b>“Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011”</b></a>, Geophys. Res. Lett. 41:3502–3509</li></ul>The researchers found that the “tipping point” has already passed for one of these “long-term” events. In the “Guardian” on 18 May 2014, lead researcher Dr Eric Rignot <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/climate-change-antarctica-glaciers-melting-global-warming-nasa">explained</a>: “We announced that we had collected enough observations to conclude that the <u>retreat of ice in the Amundsen sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable</u>, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre worldwide. What's more, its disappearance <u>will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet</u>, which comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide” (emphasis added).<br /><br />This study, authored by some the world’s best cryosphere scientists, stunned the research community. Malte Meinshausen, an IPCC lead author who also developed the RCP scenarios, said this research is “a game changer, this is just one surprise with global warming of only 0.8 degrees of warming", and a “tipping point that none of us thought would pass so quickly”, showing we are ”committed already to a change in coastlines that is unprecedented for us humans” (https://vimeo.com/97926131).<br /><br />One of the authors of this paper was asked what conditions would be necessary to stop the loss of most of WAIS. The answer was that restoring the temperature of the 1970s might do it.<br /><br />On the fate of West Antartica, Rignot <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/climate-change-antarctica-glaciers-melting-global-warming-nasa">says </a>“at the current rate, a large fraction of the (WAIS) basin will be gone in 200 years, but recent modelling studies indicate that the retreat rate will increase in the future… but <u>it could be within a couple of centuries</u>” (emphasis added). <br /><br />Another paper (Joughin, Smith and Medley (2014) <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/344/6185/735"><b>“Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Underway for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica”</b></a>, Science, 344:735–738) uses models which the “indicate that early-stage collapse has begun” of the Thwaites Glacier, and that <u>no further acceleration</u> of climate change and only modest extrapolations of the current increasing mass loss rate <u>are necessary for the system eventually to collapse</u>.&nbsp; “The next stable state for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might be no ice sheet at all,” says the paper’s lead author, glaciologist Ian Joughin.<br /><br />Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre and John Abraham of the University of St Paul explain: “For decades, it has been suspected that this region is particularly susceptible to rapid ice loss, through a ‘runaway retreat’. The cause of the retreat is known to be increased frequency of warm ocean water intrusions onto the continental shelf, which appears to be a consequence of increased westerly circumpolar winds over the Southern Ocean. Models suggest that increased winds are a result of increased greenhouse gas forcing in the Earth system, and ozone loss effects on stratospheric/tropospheric circulation” (<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273187021_Briefing_Antarctic_ice_sheet_mass_loss_and_future_sea-level_rise"><b>“Briefing: Antarctic ice sheet mass loss and future sea-level rise”</b></a>, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 2014).<br /><ul><li>Feldman and Levermann (2015) <b><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/112/46/14191.abstract">“Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet after local destabilization of the Amundsen Basin”</a>,</b> PNAS 112;14191-14196</li></ul>This modelling study of the Amundsen Basin finds that “a local destabilization causes a complete disintegration of the marine ice in West Antarctica… the region disequilibrates after 60 years of currently observed melt rates”..&nbsp; [Melt rates are observed to be continuing to accelerate, so the actual time line may be a good deal shorter.] However "whether this localized destabilization will yield a full discharge of marine ice from West Antarctica, associated with a global sea-level rise of more than 3 metre, or whether the ice loss is limited by ice dynamics and topographic features, is unclear." The significance of the study is given as: “The Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, and playing a more important role in terms of global sea-level rise. The Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica <u>has most likely been destabilized</u>. Although previous numerical modeling studies examined the short-term future evolution of this region, here we take the next step and simulate the long-term evolution of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Our results show that if the Amundsen Sea sector is destabilized, then <u>the entire marine ice sheet will discharge into the ocean</u>, causing a global sea-level rise of about 3 metres. We thus might be witnessing the beginning of a period of self-sustained ice discharge from West Antarctica that requires long-term global adaptation of coastal protection” (emphasis added). The model in this study says that it will take about 2000 years to see the first meter of global sea-level rise from the WAIS collapse.&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><ul><li>Hansen, Sato et al (2015) <a href="http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/"><b>“Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2°C global warming could be dangerous”</b></a>, Atmos. Chem. Phys. 16:3761-3812</li></ul>This research surveys evidence from the previous warm Eemian interglacial period around 120,000 years ago. At that time there were rapid fluctuations in sea level, and the study identifies a mechanism in the Earth’s climate system not previously understood, which points to a much more rapid rise in sea levels than currently anticipated. Increasing ocean stratification occurs when cooler surface layers from melting ice sheets trap warmer waters underneath, accelerating their impact on the melting of ice shelves and outlet glaciers. This in turn increases ice sheet mass loss, and generates more cool surface melt water in a positive feedback.<br /><br />The consequences include the slowing or shutting down of key ocean currents including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which Hansen <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/mar/24/has-veteran-climate-scientist-james-hansen-foretold-the-loss-of-all-coastal-cities-with-latest-study">says</a> would increase temperature differentials between tropical and sub-polar waters, and drive “super storms” such that “All hell will break loose in the North Atlantic and neighbouring lands”.&nbsp; The projected cooling pattern of waters around Antarctica and the north Atlantic waters from the injection of fresh ice-melt water is already visible in the observed data (see diagram below), and is already contributing to a circulation decline of AMOC.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fOGYUXyQCdc/WIVCTQ2sYgI/AAAAAAAABx4/iXmvuh55MU4UMPkEtjYK-5b52l38JMIyACLcB/s1600/hansen%2Band%2B2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fOGYUXyQCdc/WIVCTQ2sYgI/AAAAAAAABx4/iXmvuh55MU4UMPkEtjYK-5b52l38JMIyACLcB/s640/hansen%2Band%2B2016.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Diagram shows: (left) the Hansen et al projection for 2065 of temperature with accelerated ice melt in both hemispheres; and (right) actual conditions at February 2016 at the height of the 2015-2016 El Nino.</td></tr></tbody></table><ul><li>Smith, Anderson et al (2016) <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v541/n7635/full/nature20136.html"><b>“Sub-ice-shelf sediments record history of twentieth-century retreat of Pine Island Glacier”</b></a>, Nature, 23 November 2016, doi:10.1038/nature20136</li></ul>This study finds that the present thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is part of <u>a climatically forced trend that was triggered in the 1940s</u> when an ocean cavity formed beneath the ice shelf, and followed a period of strong warming of West Antarctica, associated with El Niño activity. The final ungrounding of the ice shelf from the seafloor ridge occurred in 1970 (see diagram below).<br /><br />It is interesting to compare this result with the view of researchers in the Rignot, Mouginot et al 2014 paper cited above that restoration of climate conditions of 1970s would be necessary to prevent widespread ice mass loss from WAIS.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lg0RQQ-wYMY/WIVCmNtMYOI/AAAAAAAAByA/e1a7apvRaGY3tKIsocoA5ZcmFW6jg6yEgCLcB/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2016-12-01%2Bat%2B1.09.45%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="159" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lg0RQQ-wYMY/WIVCmNtMYOI/AAAAAAAAByA/e1a7apvRaGY3tKIsocoA5ZcmFW6jg6yEgCLcB/s640/Screen%2BShot%2B2016-12-01%2Bat%2B1.09.45%2BPM.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><ul><li>Khazendar, Rignot et al (2016) <a href="http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13243" target="_blank"><b>“Rapid submarine ice melting in the grounding zones of ice shelves in West Antarctica”</b></a>, Nature Communications 7 no 13243</li></ul>Researchers report the first direct observations (as opposed to satellite data) of ice melt from the floating undersides of glaciers in West Antarctica Amundsen Sea sector. They show that the amount of warm ocean water penetrating the undersides of the Smith, Pope, and Kohler glaciers at their grounding lines — the point at which a glacier’s ice is anchored to the sea floor — and melting them from below has increased significantly between 2002 and 2014. These glaciers flow into the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves. Previous studies using other techniques estimated the average melting rates at the bottom of these ice shelves to be about 12 meters per year. However this research found stunning rates of ice loss from the glaciers' undersides with Smith, the fastest-melting glacier, losing between 300 and 490 meters in thickness from 2002 to 2009 near its grounding line, or up to 70 meters per year. Lead author Ala Khazendar said Smith's fast retreat and thinning are likely related to the shape of the underlying bedrock over which it was retreating between 1996 and 2014, which sloped downward toward the continental interior, and oceanic conditions in the cavity beneath the glacier. As the grounding line retreated, warm and dense ocean water could reach the newly uncovered deeper parts of the cavity beneath the ice shelf, causing more melting.<br /><br /><b>A note on timelines for collapse of WAIS</b>: The papers survey here in general agree that the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has most likely been (or will soon be) destabilized and no further acceleration in climate change is necessary to trigger a collapse of a significant fraction of the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. However the timeline for significant collapse is contested. Rignot says that "at the current rate, a large fraction of the (West Antarctic) basin will be gone in 200 years" and the Pollard, DeConto and Alley model “accelerates the expected collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to decadal time scales, and also causes retreat into major East Antarctic subglacial basins", producing five metres in the first 200 years.&nbsp; And DeConto and Pollard say that "Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100", which would include a collapse of a significant fraction of WAIS this century.<br />On the other hand, the Feldman and Levermann model says that the complete disintegration of WAIS is on "a millennial time scale". And the Joughin, Smith and Medley model says losses will be moderate over this century "with the onset of rapid (&gt;1 mm per year of sea-level rise) collapse in the different simulations within the range of 200 to 900 years."<br /><br /><b>RECENT RESEARCH: EAST ANTARCTICA</b><br /><ul><li>DeConto and Pollard (2016) <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7596/full/nature17145.html"><b>“Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise”</b></a>, Nature 531:591–597</li></ul>In this research, climate models that better link atmospheric warming with the fracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of their ice cliffs are used, calibrated against past warm-period climate events and sea-level estimates, and then applied to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios.<br /><br />During the last interglacial (warm) period&nbsp; 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, the global mean sea level&nbsp; was 6–9.3 metres higher than it is today, at a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were below 280 parts per million (the pre-industrial level, and 30% less than today),and global mean temperatures were only about 0–2 °C warmer.<br /><br />Under a high-emissions scenario, their model shows that rapidly warming summer air temperatures trigger extensive surface meltwater production and hydrofracturing of ice shelves by the middle of this century, with Larcen C the first ice shelf to be lost, and major thinning and retreat of Amundsen Sea outlet glaciers at the same time. (Note: The fracturing of the Larsen C ice shelf is a current reality!)<br /><br />They conclude that: “Antarctica has the <u>potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100</u> and more than 15 metres &nbsp;by 2500”, doubling previous forecasts for total &nbsp;sea level rise this century to two metres or more.<br /><br />This estimate of Antarctica alone contributing “more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100” is consistent with the work of Hansen, Sato et al (above).<br /><ul><li>Pollard, DeConto and Alley (2015) <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X14007961"><b>“Potential Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat driven by hydrofracturing and ice cliff failure”</b></a>, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 412:112–121.</li></ul>During the warmest part of the Pliocene (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago) atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were comparable to today’s (~400 parts per million), temperatures were 1–2°C warmer than now, and some sea-level reconstructions are 10–30 metres higher. Because WAIS and Greenland can supply less than 10 metres of sea level rise between them, this means there was substantial ice mass loss from East Antartica.&nbsp; In this study, the authors model Pliocene conditions in the Antarctic by taking the current (and Pliocene) level of 400 parts per million carbon dioxide, and impose a 2°C ocean warming to represent maximum mid-Pliocene ocean warmth. Their model also incorporates mechanisms based on recent observations and analysis: “floating ice shelves may be drastically reduced or removed completely by increased oceanic melting, and by hydrofracturing due to surface melt draining into crevasses. Ice at deep grounding lines may be weakened by hydrofracturing and reduced buttressing, and may fail structurally if stresses exceed the ice yield strength, producing rapid retreat.” The updated model <u>“accelerates the expected collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to decadal time scales </u>(rather than century-to-millennial time scales), and also causes retreat into major East Antarctic subglacial basins, producing ∼17 metres global sea-level rise within a few thousand years” and <u>five metres in the first 200 years</u> (emphasis added).<br /><br />[In the followup 2016 paper cited above, an updated model produces an 11.3-metre contribution to global mean sea level rise, reflecting a reduction in its sensitivity of about 6 metres relative to the formulation in this paper of ~17 metres, but within the range of plausible sea-level estimates.]<br /><ul><li>Phipps, Fogwill and Turney (2016) <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308765775_Impacts_of_marine_instability_across_the_East_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet_on_Southern_Ocean_dynamics"><b>“Impacts of marine instability across the East Antarctic Ice Sheet on Southern Ocean dynamics”</b></a>, The Cryosphere, 10:2317–2328</li></ul>This research concludes that local melting from the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica “could potentially destabilise the wider Antarctic Ice Sheet” as meltwater rapidly stratifies surface waters so, whilst the surface ocean cools, the Southern Ocean warms by more&nbsp; than 1°C at depth. “The temperature changes propagate westwards around the coast of the Antarctic continent with increasing depth, representing a positive feedback mechanism that has the potential to amplify melting around the continent… Thus, destabilisation of large sectors of the EAIS could arise from warming and melting in just one area.” As well: “Our results suggest that melting of one sector of the EAIS could result in accelerated warming across other sectors, including the Weddell Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet” (emphasis added).<br /><br />This paper is also consistent with Hansen, Sato&nbsp; et al in finding a process of water column stratification and warmer sub-surface waters as a positive feedback mechanism that has the potential to amplify melting. <br /><ul><li>Mendel and Levermann (2014)<b> <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n6/full/nclimate2226.html">“Ice plug prevents irreversible discharge from East Antarctica”</a>,</b> Nature Climate Change 4:451–455</li></ul>Substantial sectors of the EAIS, including Wilkes Basin, are underlain by extensive marine-based subglacial basins.&nbsp; This study shows that the removal of an ice plug (shelf) at the margin of the Wilkes Basin, that would cause less than 80mm of global sea-level rise, would destabilize the regional ice flow and leads to a self-sustained discharge of the entire basin and a global sea-level rise of 3–4 metres.&nbsp; As with the DeConto and Pollard papers above, this study also discusses the analogous situation of the the mid-to late Pliocene when “massive ice discharge occurred from the unstable margins of Adélie and Wilkes Land due to ice-stream surges that were linked to rapid grounding-line retreat during a warming climate”. <br /><ul><li>Lenaerts, Lhermitte et al (2016) <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n1/full/nclimate3180.html"><b>“Meltwater produced by wind–albedo interaction stored in an East Antarctic ice shelf”</b></a>, Nature Climate Change 7:58-62</li></ul>This study identifies a mechanism that triggers&nbsp;melting deep in the Roi Baudouin ice shelf in East Antarctica. Strong winds helped heat the air and cause white ice to melt out, exposing a layer of dark ice beneath, which in turns absorbs more sunlight, further expediting the melt. In these hotspots, surface glacial lakes form and meltwater pours into moulins, that funnel surface meltwater into the heart of the ice. As well, researchers found subterranean “englacial” lakes in the ice sheet. In total, 55 lakes on or in the ice shelf were identified. This means the ice shelf has many large pockets of weakness throughout its structure, suggesting a greater potential vulnerability to collapse through hydrofracturing, especially if lake formation continues or increases.<br /><ul><li>Fogwill, Turney et al (2017) <a href="http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39979"><b>“Antarctic ice sheet discharge driven by atmosphere-ocean feedbacks at the Last Glacial Termination”</b></a>, Scientific Reports 7, article&nbsp; 39979</li></ul>Antarctic ice mass loss during the end of the last ice age 14,600–12,700 yrs ago contributed several metres to sea levels which from various sources rose by tens of metres. At that time, changes in atmospheric-oceanic circulation led to a stratification in the ocean with a cold layer at the surface and a warm layer below. Under such conditions, ice sheets melt more strongly than when the surrounding ocean is thoroughly mixed. This is exactly what is presently happening around the Antarctic now. Research team member Michael E. Weber says, "The changes that are currently taking place in a disturbing manner resemble those 14,700 years ago."<br /><br />A NUMBER of recent studies have focussed on the Totten Glacier in East Antartica. Several lines of evidence suggest possible collapse of Totten Glacier into interior basins during past warm periods, most notably the Pliocene epoch, and the glacier is again becoming vulnerable:<br /><ul><li>Totten has the largest thinning rate in East Antarctica, driven by enhanced melting of the ice shelf bottom, due to ocean processes. An ice-shelf cavity below depths of 400 to 500 metres could allow intrusions of warm water and an inland trough that connects the main ice-shelf cavity to the ocean. If thinning trends continue, a larger water body over the trough could potentially allow more warm water into the cavity, which may, eventually, lead to destabilization of the low-lying region between Totten Glacier and the similarly deep glacier flowing into the Reynolds Trough [Greenbaum, Blankenship et al (2015) <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n4/full/ngeo2388.html"><b>“Ocean access to a cavity beneath Totten Glacier in East Antarctica”</b></a>, Nature GeoScience].</li><li>Totten could become unstable if global warming continues at the present pace. As warm seas wash the ice shelf, the land-based mass of ice could begin to retreat, cross a critical threshold in the present century&nbsp;and then withdraw 300 kilometres inland [Aitken, Roberts et al (2016) <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7603/full/nature17447.html"><b>“Repeated large-scale retreat and advance of Totten Glacier indicated by inland bed erosion”</b></a>, Nature 533:385–389].</li><li>Totten is melting from below as warm ocean water flows inward powerfully towards Totten glacier, causing the ice shelf to lose between 63 and 80 billion tons of its mass to the ocean per year.&nbsp; Warm water enters a cavity beneath the glacier&nbsp; through a newly discovered deep water channel [Rintoul, Silvan et al (2016) <a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/12/e1601610.full"><b>“Ocean heat drives rapid basal melt of the Totten Ice Shelf”</b></a>, Science Advances&nbsp; 2:e1601610]. </li></ul><br /><b>CONCLUSION</b><br /><br />In late 2015, a chilling report by scientists for the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative on “Thresholds and closing windows: Risks of irreversible cryosphere climate change” (http://iccinet.org/thresholds) warned that the Paris commitments will not prevent the Earth “crossing into the zone of irreversible thresholds” in polar and mountain glacier regions, and that crossing these boundaries may “result in processes that cannot be halted unless temperatures return to levels below pre-industrial” (emphasis added). The report says it is not well understood outside the scientific community that cryosphere dynamics are slow to manifest but once triggered “inevitably forces the Earth’s climate system into a new state, one that most scientists believe has not existed for 35–50 million years” (emphasis added).<br /><br />Ian Howat, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University, says: “It’s generally accepted that it’s no longer a question of <b>whether </b>the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, it’s a question of <b>when</b>. This kind of rifting (cracking) behaviour provides another mechanism for rapid retreat of these glaciers, adding to the probability that we may see significant collapse of West Antarctica in our lifetimes.” (https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/antarctic-ice-sheet-global-warming)<br /><br />The scientists I have communicated with take the view that Rignot, Mouginot et al. is a credible paper and, together with the evidence published since, it would be prudent to accept that WAIS has very likely passed its tipping point for mass deglaciation, with big consequences for global sea level rise (SLR). DeConto and Pollard project more than a metre of SLR from Antarctica this century. This tallies with the Hanse, Sato et al scenario, which is also consistent with the findings of Phipps, Fogwill and Turney.<br /><br />The reality of multi-metre SLRs is not if, but how soon. “The natural state of the Earth with present CO2 levels is one with sea levels about 70 feet (21 metres) higher than now” says Prof. Kenneth G. Miller&nbsp; (http://news.rutgers.edu/news-releases/2012/03/global-sea-level-lik-20120316).&nbsp; Other research scientists agree it is likely to be more than 20 metres over the longer term (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090622103833.htm).<br /><br />So how much could we expect sea levels to rise this century?<br /><ul><li>“Current estimates of sea-level rise range from 0.50 metre to over 2 metres by 2100”, reported the November 2009 issue of <b>"Science Update 2009"</b> published by CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.</li><li>…” sea-level rise ranging from 75 to 190 cm for the period 1990-2100”, concluded Vermeer and Rahmstorf (2009), <b>“Global sea level linked to global temperature”</b>, PNAS 106:21527-32</li><li>In 2012, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported “Scientists have very high confidence (greater than 90% chance) that global mean sea level will rise at least 8 inches (0.2 meter) and no more than 6.6 feet (2.0 meters) by 2100.”&nbsp; NOAA provides four sea level rise scenarios to 2100, of which the highest of 2 metres by 2100 “reflects ocean warming and the maximum plausible contribution of ice sheet loss and glacial melting. This highest scenario should be considered in situations where there is little tolerance for risk” (Parris, Bromirski et al (2012) <b>“Global Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States National Climate Assessment”</b>, NOAA Tech Memo OAR CPO-1, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Silver Spring, MD).</li><li><b><u>Breaking news</u>:</b> An <b><a href="https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/techrpt83_Global_and_Regional_SLR_Scenarios_for_the_US_final.pdf">updated NOAA sea-level rise report</a></b> just released recommends a revised worst-case sea-level rise rise scenario <b>of&nbsp;2.5 metres by 2100</b>, 5.5 metres by 2150 and&nbsp;9.7 metres by 2200.&nbsp;It says sea level science has “advanced significantly over the last few years, especially (for) land-based ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica under global warming”, and hence the “correspondingly larger range of possible 21st century rise in sea level than previously thought”.&nbsp; It points to “continued and growing evidence that both&nbsp;Antarctica and Greenland are losing mass at an accelerated rate”, which “strengthens an&nbsp;argument for considering worst-case scenarios in coastal risk management”.</li></ul>The general view amongst scientists I have communicated with is to expect a sea-level rise this century of at least 1 metre, and perhaps in excess of 2 metres in light of the work surveyed above.&nbsp; Scientists have found the business of putting a true upper limit on how much ice could melt — and how quickly — is a difficult one.<br />Among a myriad of devastating global impacts, a 1-metre sea-level rise would inundate up to 20% of the land area of Bangladesh and displace 30 million people, wipe out 40-50% of the Mekong Delta, flood one-fourth of the Nile Delta, and depopulate some coral atoll small states.<br /><br />The only practical conclusion to be drawn is that climate warming has already gone to far, and the objective must be to achieve a level of greenhouse gases, and of global temperature, well below that currently prevailing.http://www.climatecodered.org/2017/01/antarctic-tipping-points-for-multi.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (David Spratt)0